Storytime with Rachel F Hundred

Novels are the marathons of the writing world.

I remind myself of this every day because it is easy with a novel to get discouraged because of the sheer number of words between the blank page at day one, and the finished article. Even with a great story in your head, the amount of writing to get it out and onto metaphorical paper can feel overwhelming.

Twenty-odd years ago when I first wrote about Eddie and Jemima, the novel was 90k in length. I planned for a similar length but set myself the target of writing it this month. National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) advocates for a 50k target, which is approximately 1.66k per day. To hit my target, I needed to ensure I was hitting a pace of 3k per day, or a chapter a day.

Daunting.

My first tactic to achieve my target was to give myself grace that I wasn’t going to achieve it if it meant compromising my health. This may seem completely counterintuitive, but I won’t do myself any favours running myself into the ground writing the novel. My health is better than it had been for some time, but I still have bad days. I also have other things I need to get done so writing on the novel has to be balanced with those too.

My to-do list has these words over the top of it: “All lists are subject to having enough spoons. Listen to your body. Give yourself grace.”

And it has worked for me. Giving myself permission to make the right decision to prioritise my health has been a very powerful tool in my arsenal to get my health back on track.

So, permission to fail if I need to prioritise my health granted.

My second tactic was to look at the minimum target I would feel would be an accomplishment. I determined that if I achieved a normal NaNoWriMo target of 50k that would be a huge success for me. It would mean that I was over halfway complete and give me a good impetus to continue to finish.  This means that the minimum word count I need to achieve every day is 1.6k.

My third tactic was to break down the novel through its structure into smaller components. I determined that I would have three ‘acts’ within the novel, each of ten chapters, and each chapter would be approximately 3k words in length. This meant that I was essentially setting out to write a chapter per day.

My fourth tactic has been to set myself 500 word sprints.  In essence, every time I sit down to write, I’m only aiming for 500 words.  Not a chapter. Not 3000. Just 500. I just need to get through the next 500 words. Of course, often when I’m in the flow I’ll write more than 500 and that’s OK.      

My fifth tactic has been to keep my story bible and plotline handy, making notes as I go. This means that if I need to check on the name of a character’s brother, or consider where something fits in the timeline, I can do a quick glance check without interrupting my flow too much. If I add something new to a character, I can quickly note that. Or if I have a sudden thought that ‘I think I needed to seed this earlier’ I can make a note of it on the plot for the next draft without feeling I need to fix it right now.

So, how are these tactics working out for me?

I completed my minimum target this week. Currently I have two acts completed, twenty chapters drafted, and approximately 61k written.  I’m hugely proud of my achievement so far, and it is giving me motivation and impetus to continue onward.

There have been two challenges that I’ve been facing and will likely still face in the remaining days in November.

The first is that I can sense trepidation bubbling up as I near a milestone.  As I got towards the end of act one, as I began chapter fifteen, and as I’ve neared the end of act two. The trepidation makes me less likely to write, creates a little writer’s block, and I have to face it down and continue writing. I’ll explore the reasons why I might feel this way when I get to the end of the novel, but I am aware of it now and so can handle it better.

The second challenge is that all I want to do is write. Why is this a challenge?

Well, it is a challenge to a healthy balance across all aspects of my life.

I am making good decisions about my health. I had a severe headache one day this week and on that day I simply rested for a large part of it, and did a few 500 word sprints when the headache eased achieving the minimum for the day but no more. But I put this down to my first tactic.

What I’m not quite achieving is balance everywhere else. I’ve written very little for my business. I haven’t finished up the redesign of the website. I haven’t progressed other content such as videos and podcasts. I’ve done nothing on my online course’s assignment which is due. There are a couple of things in the house I must get done yet I’ve left them to languish.

I have managed to get a few other things moving beside the novel – I managed to submit a story to a competition, do a Writer’s Log, post up poetry I wrote a while back for Remembrance Day, and edit/post up an original story which I did not submit to the competition (that story has had a lot of likes and a couple of lovely feedback comments which has also boosted my morale).

I’ve also continued to deliver coaching and mentoring sessions to clients and attended a couple of networking events which also includes the follow-up to them.

Actually listing all this out, I’ve got more done alongside the novel than I thought, but I still know I’m not juggling everything the way that I had hoped I would be able to juggle.  

Wallowing in my fiction writing is great, I love being wholly in it, but I have to remember it is not the only thing on my to-do list. That said, my tactic for dealing with this right now is to ruthlessly prioritise my health and the novel above all else; to listen to my inner voice saying ‘let’s get this done and worry about the rest later.’ Maybe that will work out, maybe it won’t, but I think it’s the best approach for right now, and when I come to write another novel, I need to think of a better tactic to address this.

One act, ten chapters, and 30k of words to go.

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