45,000 Words — Does it really matter?

I’ve hit the mark — 45,094 words — with two hours and twelve minutes to spare.  Of course, as Joesph points out in the comment to my last post, is it worth it?  I began responding to his comment, and then realized that it warranted a full post, so here’s his comment:

You know, it is very good to have daily or weekly goals in order make sure you continue making progress over time, but I worry that setting an arbitrary goal like 45k by the end of the month, and then trying to cram it in, will just end up hurting your writing.

If you miss your goal one day, or one week, that’s fine, that’s life. The important thing is to keep moving forward, and to make the quality of your writing the highest priority, not the quantity.

Plus, constantly killing yourself on random evenings to reach a goal can actually make you dislike writing, in the same way that most people dislike jogging when they focus on the bathroom scale.

And my response:

I agree — while I hit the 45,000 word goal tonight, if I missed it I wouldn’t be too worried.  My weekly/monthly goals tend to be fairly reasonable — 2,000-3,000 words per week, with a monthly goal in the 10,000 word range, only actually require a couple of good nights a week worth of writing (on the good nights, I can pump out a good 1,000+ words) to hit.  More important, however, is my goal that I have to write something every night.  I’ve had nights where I only push out 100 words, and it takes awhile, but I make myself do it.

The only thing that has really held me back this weekend has been my own attention span.  For some reason, after a full day of work, when I come home, I find it fairly easy to concentrate on my writing for a couple of hours.  When I don’t have to work, I find it far more difficult to do so — I get distracted by every little thing and find that four hours have passed and I haven’t written anything because I’ve been too busy doing X, Y and Z.  Once I hit the groove, it tends to come out in bulk, and if I set little targets for myself, I find it easier to keep going (such as, you can walk the dog for the eighth time in four hours after you’ve written another 250 words).

If the words just didn’t want to come out today, I wouldn’t have pushed them simply for the purpose of reaching 45,000 words — I don’t want to sacrifice quality for quantity.   The issue was that the words were there, and they wanted to come out, but I couldn’t focus on what I was doing for long enough to let them out.

Pushing through…..

I’ve already completed my goal for August (hitting the 40,000 word mark).  Based on the progress I made getting there, I figured that I could make my stretch goal — hitting the 45,000 word mark before the end of the month.

This week wasn’t particularly productive — a couple of outside factors in my life conspired to thwart my progress.  Still, as I write this I sit on 43,311 words — 1,689 words short of my stretch goal, with 7 hours and 50 minutes left in the month.  Can I do it?  I sure hope so.  I’m going to keep plugging away at this one, seeing if I can indeed hit 45,000 words by the end of the day.

I’ll update my progress at the end of the night, or early tomorrow.

What drives your characters?

Everybody is driven by something.  Sometimes, we’re driven by inertia, but that’s still a driving force (though it seems like a bit of an oxymoron to me….).  Look at any action in your life, and there’s some driving force behind it.  Eating?  It’s often driven by hunger.  Watching the game?  Driven by the need for entertainment.  Writing?  Driven by the writing bug.

Your characters need an impetus too.  Too often, characters appear to be driven by “the world needs me to save it” and go from there.  Personally, I think that’s a weak out for the character’s driving force.  Even the cliché “I have to save my one true love from the evil villain” (evil villain is redundant, yet appropriate) is a better impetus.

When you’re developing a character, give some thought to what drives them.  It should give you insight into the character as a person, and help you with developing their backstory.  You should be able to succinctly describe a character’s motivation, and it should have a connection to their backstory.

I often like to stop and review a character’s motivation and think “what would they choose and why?”  It helps me get through difficult passages when I’m writing, because sometimes we lose sight of the characters as people, and think of them as driving mechanisms for the story we want to tell, not the story they’re involved in.  So what drives your characters?

Showing some weakness

I’m currently at a point in the book where I delve into several of the characters back-stories to help give them depth and create a connection with the reader.  One of the things I’ve found is that you really need to provide weaknesses for the characters, because you want them to seem human (particularly since my main characters are all human).  One thing that will turn me off of a book quite quickly is when the main character is flawless (I would also note that this is also true of ancillary characters, though it would generally take multiple transgression here to turn me off of an otherwise good read).  It removes a sense of reality that I feel is necessary to connect the reader to the prose.

Of course, the opposite of the flawless character is the overly-flawed one.  All characters need a flaw — every person you know has one, every character you encounter in a book should as well.  The flaw, however, must be something that can be overcome by the character — this struggle helps define the character.  On occasion, you encounter a character that has so many flaws that overcoming those flaws seems unrealistic.

Generally, I try to limit each character to one major and one or two minor flaws.  The major flaw is something the character has to overcome (this is the point I’m at in the novel for several of the characters).  The minor flaws are some of the things that just make those characters unique — they’re usually personality quirks and don’t have a major impact on that character’s actions.

Think back to things you’ve written, or things you’ve read.  Think about your favorite characters.  What were their flaws?  How did they overcome them?

40,000 words…

…have been written.  Last night, I hit 40,093 words, meeting my August goal, and putting me on pace to hit my stretch goal of 45,000 words (including today, I have six days to write 4,907 words, or ~818 words a night).  Since I don’t have plans for a particularly busy weekend (unlike this past weekend), I expect that I should beat the stretch goal.  With Labor Day starting September, I expect to have a great start to the next month as well.

Some progress….

This weekend was definitely an unproductive one, although I did make sure to write some on both Friday and Saturday (maybe 300 words each day).  In a few minutes, I’m going to sit down with the laptop to do today’s writing — I expect to have a decent night of work.

I’m not disappointed with the last two days — I really had full plates both days and just didn’t have the time (indeed, Friday’s writing was done on my laptop next to a BBQ, since the only opportunity I had was in between flipping ribs).  Sure I could’ve written late at night, but I had to be up relatively early both Saturday and today, and I wasn’t about to sacrifice sleep (which would probably have come with a sacrifice in quality too).  Thankfully, I have tomorrow morning off, so I can stay up later tonight writing.  Gotta love half days….

Wow

Just over 1,400 words today.  I’m up to 37,831 words, or 2,981 words more than I was two days ago.  It feels really good seeing the word count pile up.  40,000, here I come!

Breaking Through

Since I broke the little wall I hit the other day, the words have been flowing quickly.  I pounded out over 1,500 words last night, and expect another 1,000-1,300 tonight.  I should definitely break the 40,000 word mark (probably this week), and I expect to hit the 45,000 word mark by the end of the month.

It’s amazing what happens once the floodgates open.  I got past a little impasse scene for me — a battle I couldn’t seem to get past.  As soon as I did, I hit a bump, which I think was a result of my brain trying to rest after struggling with the battle for so long (I’ve been writing the battle sequence, which is interspersed with some other scenes for a couple of months probably).  Now, the next part of the book is flowing smoothly and I’m not feeling any angst about getting through it.

I outlined the remainder of the book, separating it into 22 parts (of varying size).  I had previously outlined it, but then realized that some of the items needed to be moved around, modified and, in a few cases, deleted.  The updated outline should last me for awhile, before I re-evaluate and possibly make more changes.

Quick Update

I broke through the little wall I hit yesterday — I got some good writing done over the last couple of hours.  I’m up to 34,850 words (or 4,709 words more than I had when I started the blog 2 1/2 weeks ago).  I’m a little behind the pace I had set for myself (2000-3000 words per week), but it’s picking up.  My goal for the month will be to break the 40,000 word mark, which should be doable (less than 400 words per day), with a stretch goal of 45,000 words (in other words, my goal is really to hit 45,000 words, but I’ll be happy if I break 40,000).  I can feel several good nights of writing ahead of me, although this weekend it’ll be difficult to get any done (I have a pretty packed schedule this weekend).  Still, I think the 45,000 word goal will be feasible.

The Blank Stare

I spent a couple hours sitting in front of the computer, staring at the screen.  I managed to get about 50 words written.  I’ve gotten past the battle scene that’s been driving me crazy, though I kind of cheated my way around it and finished it with kind of a “summation” scene.

Still, it took me hours to write even that much.  I don’t think it’s writer’s block — I know where I’m going, and (for the most part) what I’m going to say, but it’s just getting the words down on paper that seem to be a problem (indeed, it’s taken me about 30 minutes to write this much of the blog post).  Not much I can do other than sit, place my hands over the keyboard and wait.

The words are there.  So is the blank stare.