I've heard it said that writers end up writing the book they need to hear, not necessarily the book they live by. I think that was true of the post yesterday. I'm fully convinced that is what happened. I've been writing a story about what would happen if dimension hopping became a thing, and the guy going dimension hopping was a self-centered asshole out of to save his own skin from his own stupidity. I've been writing that story for a while, off and on. It's currently sitting about 19 pages worth of material, but the story isn't finished and it's going to take a few more pages before I even start to finalize.
The problem is that I haven't been adding to the story very frequently. I'm a proponent of tracking most things you do during the day. I don't do it near enough, but I'm a proponent. I can give you a rough estimate when I will finish the book I'm currently reading, and I can tell you the average days between when I write. And right now that average days number is sitting at 26.
The simple answer is you are never going to finish anything if you don't pick it up but once a month. It doesn't matter how many words you write during those single sessions. And I can almost guarantee when you do write for that one session, it's going to be way shorter than you thought. On Average, I write about 360 words per period. The max I've ever tracked in a day was 757. So that tells me is I'm not going to finish this thing any time soon if one of those numbers doesn't change.
Given that collection of numbers: 26 days between writing, 360 words per session, a maximum of 757 words in a day. The easiest of those numbers to change is the 26. See, it's all about math. 360 words seems to be where my brain starts to falter. Or my limited time runs out. But... If I got to the point of writing at least 5 days a week, that would cover about 94,000 words in a year, skipping weekends.
I started this post... sometime back in 2015. I finished the story back in August. It took well longer than it probably should have. I added 9 pages until I finally came to a conclusion I wanted. Or at least that's where the story seemed to want to go. It's interesting that stories have a tendency to take on a life of their own after a while. Sometimes you have ideas. Other times, the ideas just flow from the characters you create.
It's interesting forcing those characters to life. It sometimes feels like a birth. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe that's where the real interesting stuff happens. It's between the point where the idea ran out and the execution is all there is left. That's where the most complicated bits lie. It's also where you end up having the most fun and force the best of life out of the story. Or the worst. It's also at that point that the characters start taking on a life of their own.
There was a point in the story I was talking about where I thought about adding a secondary character. But that didn't fit with the character I had created. It just wasn't that person. So I moved forward and changed the idea. All based on the character that I created. It was... the way things needed to be.
I can't say I'm really an impressive writer. What I can say is that I try to show up. And that's where I'm at with that.
I should probably go back to working on the story I'm currently working on. It's the nightmare I had turned into a story. Not sure whether it's a horror or something else. It sounds like it. But we'll see.
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