Today was Anzac Day, and my writing group held a Writers Lock In at the venue we meet at every week, the Prince Albert Hotel in Gawler, South Australia. Four of us got together when we could in the morning, and stayed until our usual group meeting time. We wrote, and wrote, working on whatever of our writing projects were that we wished to put a big effort into.
I had previously decided I would spend my time putting as many of my small bits of my novel-in-progress, a story with the working title of “Talloola Travails”, into the main file of that work. Last night I wrote down the current word count I had so far for the novel. it was nowhere near as high a number as I need, but there were all of my bits and pieces I have been writing at our group meetings, when we are given a writing prompt, and I have been thinking about my novel, and what my main character will do with that prompt …
I have many such hand written words, of around 150 to 300 words each, in various notebooks I have. If I put all of those words into the actual file of the novel I have on my laptop, and then add the bits I have on my phone, (in Notes), that will add many more words to my total. I did 1661 words today and there are probably at least twenty times that many words left to type up, and transfer …
So that’s 33220 plus the words already there – and that makes 47645 words in my novel, without writing anything new. Then there will be the words needed to join all of the pieces together, plus words to draw out the various plot pieces and sub plots, many of which exist only in my head …
If I add all of that together, I expect I will have around 60,000 words in total, and in this day and age that is enough words to make a novel, except for the genre this story is, I probably need to have more words than that. I’ll look that up now, while I’m thinking about it.
OK, so my book is a political thriller, of sorts, and the given word length for that genre is 70,000 to 90,000 words. Another word count, on another web page has given 75,000 words as the minimum count, with an upper limit of 130,000 words. I certainly can’t see this work getting to that high number of words, although who knows what might happen? The lower numbers are quite achievable I think.
I have been working on this piece since 2016, writing these small responses to prompts, using some of them to place written pieces inside of a plot outline, using the “Heroes Journey” format. This link gives a great description on what that format is, and if you want to write fiction with some kind of high level action to it, this classic style is a golden oldie, much used for exciting stories, both novels and movies.
I have a lot more work to do on feeding in and ‘fattening’ various subplots, and possibly will benefit from doing more work on each of my characters, so I know more about each of them. I think I can wait on that task until I’ve got the already written pieces slotted into the novel as it is now, first though, so it will be easier to see what I’m dealing with, in terms of things that need to be written still.
I hope you have found this look into how I am writing this novel interesting, I had a good time looking at some of the bits and pieces of what I’m doing. I realise it would be far more sensible to write directly onto my laptop. I’m not sure why I’d been hesitating about taking my laptop with me to our writers group in the past. There have been problems with internet connection at that venue in the past, but today, there was a good internet connection and none of us had any problems there at all.
I didn’t have my laptop until quite recently though, and I’m still learning about it, so felt pen on paper would be my best way to go, or writing notes on my phone … There are many ways to write a novel, and I am certainly exploring a few different ones! Being open to change, and using what is available are good ways to go in all of life, for sure.
I have no deadline for the completion on this novel, but I want to have a first draft done, and given to others to read for feedback. I’ve been reading my pieces at the writing group each week at meetings, and the other group members always seem to think it’s good, even though they haven’t read it in a connected narrative form just bits and pieces, from disparate sections of the story.
This story has been with me for three years now, and I am beginning to see an end to it all, where until our writer lock in today, I hadn’t really thought much about when this may end, and sometimes I almost decided to just forget about the whole thing. But then at the next writing group meeting, Meredith (my main character), would tell me what was going to happen, based on the writing prompt given by Alex. And I know members of the group would probably to actually like to read the full story to make sense of the scraps they heard from me over the past few years.
I’ve written the ending of the story, so I know what I’m heading toward, I just have to fill in the gaps to bring it all to that place …
If you have any ideas about good ways to write a novel, I’d love to read about it, feel free to leave a comment here.
Mallala has various community groups, all of them ‘watched over’ by Council, with a very light hand most of the time. This is a relatively new thing, having Council closely involved, but it seems to go well enough.
I feel at home in Gawler too, it’s good to be with people who know me and want to be friends with me! So I have a few places near where I live, where I feel I can get on with doing the things that interest me the most, and where my abilities are recognised as being useful to my community. These are surely necessary things, these are needed things, to help a person feel like they are worthy members of the community.
In our household we’ve gone through various coffee making methods over the years, for instance. From instant coffee, to French Press (called Plunger Coffee in Australia, where I live), to the new Aero Press, which is our newest coffee method (similar to plunger coffee, but slightly different). What might the old Plunger Coffee device think of the new, quicker Aero Press? Would there be anger, fear, jealousy? We still use both, and I sometimes might have a cup of instant coffee too, from time to time. What might the coffee devices think about that one?
I certainly don’t want to live a boring life, I want to do fun things, and find interest in the things I do, all of the things, if that’s possible, and it nearly always is possible! When you can look at life and see new possible ways to do things, life can keep on being interesting to you, and hey, isn’t that what it’s all about, having an interesting life? I think so, what do you think?
Carolyn Cordon - Creative 