Thoughts at 30,000 Words

Feb 16, 2024

Hello readers! Good news: I hit thirty-thousand words on Hand Magic yesterday. Today is February 16. I finished the zero draft on February 7th and began writing the novel on the 8th. 

Seven days. Thirty-thousand words.  One third of the book's projected length. This is the fastest I've ever produced any writing of any kind, let alone an original novel. Here's what's been churning in my brain for the past week.

1. This is an unartistic way to do art.

Let me qualify that statement, which sounds negative upon first read. When I began writing my first novel in 2020, I was all passion. Scenes poured out of me like light, like I was dancing on a tightrope or surfing a twenty-foot wave. It was exhilarating. It was incredible. It was all I wanted to do. Until, of course, I had a bunch of scenes, but no real story connecting them.

Flash forward to now, winter 2024. I mused (fairly passionately) in a Google doc for thirty pages, hitting upon a plot framework, themes, and character journeys. At the end of that doc, I outlined forth twenty-four chapters. I copy-pasted the chapters into a new doc and wrote long, detailed summaries of each one, including what would need to be included in order to build the world, allude to the bigger picture, and insinuate the plot-twists. This gave me another thirty-thousand word document; what I call my zero draft. Then I gave Leigh Bardugo's classic Shadow and Bone a skim, noting it's about eighty-five thousand words long. Eighty-five divided by twenty-four is 3540. That's 3540 words per chapter. I rounded up to 4000 words to make counting easier. Ninety-six thousand words is still within reasonable limits for Young Adult novels.

And now I'm writing the chapters. From the beginning of the book, chapter by chapter, following the zero draft closely and checking my word count every ten minutes or so. I don't feel like an artist. I feel like a technician. Like I'm sitting down at my desk in my cubicle at the big downtown office and checking things off my to-do list over the course of the day. It's brutally efficient. Unglamorous, but sort of addictive, like when you start doing one chore and get into a rhythm, and by the end of the day, your whole house is clean. Writing has never been this, but I'm into it. I like to think I'm good enough at basic prose at this point to be able to do it without the flames of passion blessing my fingertips on the keyboard. And make no mistake, the line-by-line prose of Hand Magic is nothing incredible so far. But neither is the line-by-line prose of many best-sellers, and regardless, I can fix it in edits.

2. Third-person past is uninspiring.

I write fic in third-person present. The sole reason for this is that the novel-length epic star-crossed romance fic that lit me on fire and got me into writing was written in third-person present, and I wanted to write like that. I still write fic in third-present, but I write my original works in third-past.

Why? I don't know. Seems more professional, maybe. The publishing world has strong opinions on tense, with third-past being the most common and least controversial. For my half-finished Adult fantasy novel, Magicians of the Book, it was the only tense that made sense. Third-past has a mature air about it, and I wanted my Adult novel to read mature. Hand Magic though?

Maybe because I've been writing third-present for a year and a half and gotten really good at it, but I gotta say, I'm struggling to hit the level of detail and urgency with third-past that I can do easily in third-present. Hand Magic is reading well so far, but the prose feels staid for some reason. Uninspiring on a sentence-level. Might be a second draft problem, of course, but switching to present-tense might be an effective cure. And as I've said to my roommate, another writer, third-present might make the novel read younger, which is exactly what I want. Something to consider.

3. Writing is solitary and feels weirdly unproductive.

Again, this sounds super negative at first pass. Let me explain. When you get up from your cubicle or your desk computer after working five hours, do you feel inspired? Nourished? Like you've accomplished a whole bunch of important, meaningful things? Like you could take the rest of the day by storm and kick a bunch of ass? Maybe you do. When I get up from my dining room table after writing for four hours, I feel a sense of accomplishment, sure, but also this strange, persistent feeling that I haven't actually done anything.

I've inserted myself into a different world. One that isn't real, that doesn't exist. I've typed a few more thousands of words of a story that has no corporeal substance, that takes up no space and lives entirely in the mind. I've done a great deal of work, sure, but what have I actually produced? Words in a word document that no one but me can see. Not only this, but I've spent a good part of the day sitting still and completely alone. 

Maybe once I get to the good shit in the middle of the book and past that point, it'll start feeling like bottled lightning again. Or maybe it'll always feel a bit like I've spent a good part of the day hanging out in my house not doing anything. I've worked outside doing physical labor for most of my adult life. Maybe that's why something as cerebral and intangible as writing bears this not-real feeling. Maybe if Hand Magic gets published and I can hold a physical copy in my hands, it'll seem like something I built, versus something I spent a lot of time thinking about. We'll see.

4. I've leveled up.

To end on a cheerful note: I am way better at this than ever before. I started writing in 2017. It's now 2024, and I have undoubtedly upped my game. Not just at prose, which has improved, sure, but at the most critical part of novel-writing, which is project management. Y'know? The big stuff. You can improve prose easily in subsequent drafts, but I'm of the opinion that if you have to significantly change the plot on your second pass, you're just writing the first draft of a different novel. That's what I would have had to do with Heart of the South to make it queryable, let alone publishable. But I won't have to do that with Hand Magic. If writing was engineering, I've learned to not only build the engine, but manage the assembly line. Not only can I make the parts, I can fit them together efficiently and coherently. Will there be a second draft? A third draft? Yeah, probably. But it'll be a few hours in a makeup chair, rather than a long, invasive surgery. And thank God for that.

Thanks for reading and supporting, everybody.

xx Claire

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