Lessons from the middle

My word count was a pathetic 485 yes­ter­day (plus 1,300+ words on the blog, but we’ve estab­lished that doesn’t count towards my daily 2k goal, as it DOESN’T GET THE GORRAM BOOKS WRITTEN). The brain­storm­ing I did on the blog helped a lit­tle, in that now I have a bet­ter idea of where the story is going, and I see plenty of oppor­tu­ni­ties to flesh out the out­line even more (For instance, what’s Susan doing for the entire sec­ond act, just tag­ging along? What are the con­se­quences for Jack when he keeps fail­ing to cap­ture Daniel?).

And yet, 485 words. I got about halfway into the fight scene and chick­ened out.

Part of it was that I wasn’t happy with the action. But I have to remind myself that this is a first draft. It doesn’t have to be per­fect. Hell, it doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be writ­ten. I could have Daniel and Batarel square danc­ing at this point for all it mat­ters. I just get through it and get on to the next scene, then the one after that. So that’s some­thing I have to drill into my head today, lit­er­ally if nec­es­sary. I have a hand drill right here.

But the other aspect to my hes­i­tancy yes­ter­day is a big­ger prob­lem, and some­thing that’s going to be a lot harder to get past. I’ve his­tor­i­cally had a scarcity approach to my writ­ing, “sav­ing” stuff to write later rather than writ­ing it today. This is sub­tly dif­fer­ent from run of the mill pro­cras­ti­na­tion. It really feels like I’m “pro­tect­ing” the mate­r­ial by not writ­ing it now. This “save the best for last” or “leave some for later” men­tal­ity is a core aspect of my per­son­al­ity, affect­ing the way I write to the way I eat. But it’s not help­ing me as a writer. I need to fig­ure out how to free myself to write, now, as much as I can. I don’t need to stretch this seven book series out over my whole life. I need to trust that when I get to the end of this story, more sto­ries will appear, even if I don’t see them now because all this other stuff is in the way.

So, in short:

• Don’t worry about get­ting it right. Get it written.
• Don’t worry about gaps in the out­line. That leaves the flex­i­bil­ity you’re going to need when your char­ac­ters do some­thing unexpected.
• Don’t save for tomor­row what you could write today. Let tomor­row attend to itself.