Writing a novel isn’t an easy thing to do. To have a piece of writing your could call a novel, you have to have written at least 50,000 words, and preferably longer. For general fiction novels you would be looking at 75,000 to 120,000 words for a book.
A Cosy Murder Mystery, which are what I am currently writing, ‘should have’ somewhere between 50,000 to 75,000 words, is what my check on google tells me. I can do that, can’t I? This moment of wondering if I can do it, is a problem, because if I’m not careful, my mind will decide I can’t actually do it, and the 30,000 words I’ve managed to write so far will be a waste of my writing time.
I don’t want to have to just scrap those words, and the ideas I’ve had for the current (first) novel, and the almost twenty further novels I have planned. By planned, I mean book titles a a brief idea about the murder, who, what, or how … I don’t want to ditch it all! And I have to admit, I’ve fallen in love with the idea of writing these books, and I have a lot of affection for all of the characters I have, and the setting.
If I stop this writing, my main character, Meredith will get cranky with me, and so will some of my other characters. I get the idea many people in Talloola (my town I created), are looking forward to have lots of interesting things happening around town!
So I am going to do this, and to help me, I know have a friend who has been helping me get the words written, by asking me to send 200 words to her every day. I haven’t been able to do that every day, and then she put up the number of words she wanted me to send. Then of course, along came Christmas, and this novel writing thing went by the wayside, in favour of getting presents, and then visiting for the ‘season’.
But my friend, Michelle, can=me up with a plan, and told me what it was. I thought about it, briefly, and said yea, I can and will do that. So the plan is that I will send Michelle 500 words every day, and if I miss a day, I will send extra to make up for it. This plan begins on the first of January, and will continue for all of the month.
So, by the end of the month, I’ll have 15,500 more words written for my novel, on top of the number I already have for my partly written first book. So, my current word count is around 31,000 words. Add 15,00 to that and you have 46,500 words, and that is more than half way through!
So Michelle and I will have a writing session, talking about what is there, what is needed, how it’s all going, and what needs to come next. It should be a useful discussion for sure! So when/if I get this first book in the ‘At Talloola’ series of Cosy Murder Mysteries, written and published I’m definitely going to thank Michelle in the book, as well as a couple of other friends, Cathy, and Jill! Oh, and Alex too, of course.
Alex is a member of my writing group, and so is Michelle. Alex is the one who gives group members writing prompts for the writing exercise at the group meeting, and then for homework. These prompts have been excellent for getting ideas for this book, and for poetry writing too. Prompts seem to help connect with hidden spots in the brain, and very interesting things can crawl out!
Having this group, and the group members there who are interested in how my writing is going helps to keep things going, and Christmas has been a distraction from this novel. I’ve written blog posts, at least one, about life getting in the way before. But life is what you need, so you know lots of different things, to feed into what you write!
Carolyn Cordon - Creative 