I'd like to be able to say I've been steadily writing since completing my 14-day writing challenge, but I suppose unsteadily writing would be a more accurate term. I've mostly been able to maintain my basic goal, which is to be a part of the "The 500 Club", a term coined by author Randy Ingermanson to describe the goal of writing at least 500 words per day, every day. I still tend to be a slacker on the weekends, but I've been pretty good about maintaining my word count during the week. I'm trying to push that to 1000 words per day if possible (and of course, the more the better, so there's no upper limit to how much writing I do per day), but 500 is the very bare minimum I want to make sure I get in. And starting this weekend I'm going to try to add the weekends in as well.
Of course, normally one of the keys to the whole "500 words per day" is that you're writing 500 words on your current work in progress, the goal naturally being to move steadily forward towards actually finishing a novel. Sadly I'm not quite at that stage yet, for any of the stories I've currently got queued up. Of course, the fact that I've got multiple stories queued up is a bit of the problem.
Right now I have three stories that I've at least started development on. The first was a modern-day paranormal/fantasy mystery story. The problem with this story is that the initial idea for the story was nothing more than the opening scene -- a man awakens in a diner with no memory of who he is or how he got there. I loved this idea, this moment. The problem was, I had no clue where to go with it from there. So I started to slowly develop the world of the story, while at the same time trying to develop the plot and move the story forward. Which worked fine up to a point, and then I hit a creative wall. What I'd written so far was mostly just dialogue (generally not a good thing), and I had no idea how to fix it, or how to move the story forward from the point where I was stuck.
Which led me to analyze how I write. As I've gotten more focused on being a serious writer, along with making an effort to actually write every day, I've also spent a lot more time reading about the craft of writing, and trying to learn better ways to write. One of the things I learned is that writers generally fall into one of two categories -- those writers who sit down and start writing with no real plan, just going where their ideas take them (called "pantsers" because they tend to write by the seat of their pants), and outliners, those writers who take the time and effort to build an outline of their plot and figure out all the basics of the story before they sit down and start to write the actual first draft.
In my younger days, I'd always been a pantser (even though I'd never really thought about it that way) -- whenever I felt the desire to write, I'd just sit down and start writing. I was always completely against the idea of outlining first, feeling that would stifle my creativity (and delay me from the actual writing, which was what I most wanted to spend my time on). But when I hit that creative wall on the story I was working on, it made think about the fact that I'd never really finished anything (other than the occasional short story) -- I'd either get bored because the story was wandering around going nowhere, or I'd hit that creative wall and quit because I couldn't figure out where to take the story next.
So I made the decision to set that story aside for awhile, and start fresh with something different, and this time I would try the outliner approach, and fully develop the plot and characters of the story before I started the first draft (this was before I'd done my 14-day writing challenge). My starting point this time wasn't an opening scene; instead, it was a character -- specifically, a new character I'd just developed for the Dungeons & Dragons campaign I was playing in. The character is a bounty hunter living under a curse (well, for the D&D character it's a bit different, but some of the aspects of the character were somewhat unique to D&D, so to avoid any copyright issues (plus not wanting a blatant D&D-based story) I made several basic changes between my D&D character and my new story character).
So with my new character in hand, I started building my story outline, using the Snowflake Method (see the link above to Randy Ingermanson's site -- this method of story development is what he's most known for). I was bit resistant to it at first, since this was very different from how I'd written in the past, but I started to get the basics of the outline together. And then the 14-day short story challenge happened, and I put this on hold to focus on the challenge.
The challenge was a great personal success for me. Not only did I write 14 short stories in 14 days (with an average daily word count over 1800, which for me is amazing), but the second half of the challenge produced a wonderful group of inter-connected stories that I felt potentially had the makings of a novel. So I started working on a basic outline for that, only to quickly discover there were a number of things about the story I needed to research even before I got to the point of outlining, so I set that story aside as well, and turned my attention back to my cursed bounty hunter.
I decided that I needed to know more about the city that is the main setting of the story, so I spent writing time developing and writing the history of the city (which I may post here, once I rewrite it a few times so that it's of sufficient quality that I feel comfortable letting other people read it). But, of course, as I figured out the history of the city, I realized I needed to more of the history of the region as a whole. I was also running into more issues with geography (specifically, when my character leaves the city, I had only the vaguest ideas of what the landscape in his path was like).
The more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that I really want (probably moreso than need, if I'm being honest) to fully know the world my story is going to take place in. And since I'd like to (hopefully) turn this story into a series, I figured the more world-building I did up front, the more comfortable I'd feel with my setting going forward. And the time spent felt more justified because it wasn't a bunch of time and effort spent prepping for one story, but for potentially numerous stories.
So that's where things stand as of now. I'm still making a point to get at least 500 (and preferably 1000) words written every day, but for now they aren't actual words in my story, they're words in my outline, or in character backgrounds, or world-building efforts (just finished the first draft of the history of the empire the stories take place in, but that one's still got a lot of work before it's a finalized history). My next step, I think, is to pony up some cash for a mapping program, so I can map out the continent and figure out exactly where all the key locations of the story are in relation to each other. And with luck things will steadily move forward from there!
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