Monday, October 4, 2010

Harmony's Writing a Middle-Grade in a Week Fail

As I talked about here, my goal last week was to write a middle grade in a week. I failed. My goal was 25k and I made it to 11k.

On Monday and Tuesday, I was flying. On Monday, I had 5k written by noon and on Tuesday, even though the words came a little slower, I had 5k written by one in the afternoon.

Then, on Wednesday, I ended up getting grounded. That meant no writing on Wednesday or Thursday. By the time Friday rolled around, I just wasn't feeling it anymore. I managed to push out a few hundred words but that was it.

I think another problem that I had was that 25k was too high of a goal for this particular story. Yes, it has to be at least 25k in finished form but I write very short rough drafts. I summarize a lot of things and they're just messy. By trying to hit 25k, I was adding so much unneeded description that I'm just going to have to cut in the rewrite. The next time I attempt to write a middle-grade, I think I'll probably aim for 15-20k.

Those two things aside, I'm actually pretty proud of myself. Yes, I didn't make my goal but I proved to myself that I CAN do it. If I hadn't been unable to write those two days, this post would be completely different. And, either way, I also have over 11,000 words I can work with. That's a LOT more than I had the last time I posted.

My goal for this week is to finish it and then in a few weeks, I'll start revising!

Anyone else have a writing goal for this week?

Harmony