51,000 words… Chewing it up

Ordinarily I wouldn’t write much late in the evening. Mainly because my working day takes it out of me and my brain just wants silly Netflix shows or the latest PS4 games. (Alien Isolation has me sucked in right now). Tonight was different. It was quiet day today and I had a moment of clarity about a particular scene I am working on. The interaction of my lead characters has been bothering me of late because up until recently they have been separated in the novel by location differences and haven’t had much face time together to get the chemistry rolling between them.

I got home and cranked out 1,000 words in a twenty minutes. (which almost never happens) but when it does you have to jump at it. Granted maybe a third of that is gobbledygook but when lightning strikes you have to just go with the flow. The main theme of the scene was to establish a new rapport between two of the lead characters. Writing Sci-Fi means world building and if you’re not careful the first half of your novel is spent creating the universe at great expense to the story. I am a firm believer in the power of the readers imagination and some of the greatest stories I have ever read have allowed a lot of the details of the given universe to be decided upon by reader. That’s not to say you have a right to say things like (And then they landed on the planet) without giving any sort of description of the environment but there is no reason to delve into the microscopic details of every single plant. Tell the story. Thats the priority.

 

Colin

50,000 words … the milestone

Sorry to have to start my blogging world so far into my first novel I had been doing quick snippets on tumbler but was advised to take it a little more seriously so here we are on WordPress… god help us all. My name is Colin Weldon. I have been writing for most of my life but at 34 years of age I am finally taking a stab at my first novel. It was something I supposed to start ten years ago but procrastination and self doubt being what it is the fingers didn’t start tapping until six months ago. I had started this journey on a very simple premise. Type three hundred words a day. Every day no matter what. My apartment started to quickly fill up with post it notes and note books and scraps of paper with ideas scribbled on them. No order to the chaos. (A Borgs nightmare..for any trekkies). My three hundred words a day turned to five hundred a day and as the story began to tumble out so did the word count. I am usually clocking in around 1,000 to 1,200 words a day now with a view to completing the first draft in Early December if not before. My first book is a science fiction story. I was always taught to write what you know and Sci-Fi is embedded in every idea I have had. I was going to start out by writing a thriller but every time the fingers hit the pad I was struck with an overbearing sense to get a particular story out. The first quarter of the book is currently in a awful state of affairs. The writing of the first chapter is pretty horrible to look at and hopefully it will never see the light of day. But the bones are there. A sculptor cant sculpt without clay and right now I have lots of clay. Writing a first draft is like taking that clay and hauling it up 25 flights of stairs to get it into your apartment so that you can work on it. It’s tough work. Really tough work and pretty thankless. Unless you have a significant other who pats you on the back for your effort.

About a quarter the way through I was introduced to Scrivner which helped enormously in my organisation of the book. I love the feature that allowed you to black out the rest of the distracting computer background images and concentrate purely on the words. If anyone is even thinking of taking on a novel get this programme. It’t totally worth it.

 

Chat soon

 

Colin 😉