When writing a first draft, you (or rather I) experience the jarring sensation that you’re doing something both very, very righteous and something very, very shit. When you hit that smooth patch after struggling for an hour to formulate a sentence, where entire paragraphs take shape within the space of a few minutes, where dialogue strings itself together as though you’re transcribing rather than inventing, where decisions are logical rather than arbitrary, that is what makes the process of writing a first draft worthwhile.
The rest of it, though (especially in winter), is its own special form of masochism. The characters have no motive and are inconsistent, the concepts are as weak as a girder on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and the thread holding it all together snapped somewhere back in chapter 4. What’s more, the word count is creeping up and up to heights that it shouldn’t, the weeks are turning into months, and you have the suspicion that you’re actually an utter hack who got lucky with previous publications and that this time around you’re going to be found out for sure.
This is where I’m at now. 75,000 words in to book 4 (Static Age > By the Feet of Men > Mekong Lights > IV) and I’m definitely encountering the resistance that Steven Pressfield warns against. Sometimes my self-loathing grows so great that I even read back over what I’ve written in the first draft just so I can shake my head and look mournful. I’m hoping the novel is going to top out at 120,000 words (it’s sci-fi, and for whatever reason Writers & Artists states that sci-fi novels should aim for anywhere up to 125,000 words), but who can tell? Maybe it’ll go well beyond that. Maybe it’ll unfurl forever. Maybe this one will beat me and I’ll never finish it.
I’m excited to find that out, at least.
La musique:
the inside of my brain at present