Finished First Draft of Present Work-in-Progress.

I thought you'd all like to know that I have just today finished the First Draft of my present WIP. I'm going to put it into my filing cabinet for the next couple weeks to let it cool down, and I'll be working on another manuscript in the meantime.

The Draft has taken all of ten days to complete. It's a record for me.

But I wanted you all to know that my First Draft is now done, all 27 chapters, weighing in at just a little under 40,000 words. I hope to be adding more to the work with my Second Draft, so that I can eventually make my target word count of 80,000 to 100,000 words by the time I'm done.


Talk to you all later!

Bufty said:

Sean, congratulations.

Forgive me, I'm just plain curious. 40,000 words in ten days is hard work. Will it take another 10 days to double the word count, or is this just the way you work, say quick first draft with the muse jumping up and down, to get the bare bones and plot stuff down, then perhaps longer working on fleshing everything out?

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I just wanted to get the bare bones stuff down, and the muse was moving pretty heavy on me. I usually don't have that kind of word count down in ten days. Usually it takes more than a month.

But this time it went really fast. I can't explain it; I can only say it was a lot of fun writing it down. The muse really struck hard.

Now comes the hard part: letting it sit for a couple weeks and working on something else while I gather my thoughts about this manuscript. That will be one hard two weeks for me to handle.

alaskamatt17 said:

Congratulations on finishing! It can be tough.


It's cool to see how everyone works here. Your system of writing mad dash to the end and then fleshing out later wouldn't really fit me, but it's neat to hear about. Unlce Jim's method of heavy outlining sounds good, too.

Just to share my method: I write down all the scenes for each character on sheets of college-ruled paper, then write a one-sentence description of the scene and the estimated number of pages it will take to cover everything I want in the scene. Then I organize the scenes into one composite list and group them into named chapters. Once I do this, I just start writing from the beginning, and I'm not through till I hit the words, "THE END."

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Thanks for the Congrats, Matt. It really was tough for me; I usually don't go so fast as I did this time with my work. Ten days=27 chapters, that's quite a bit of work for me.

A friend told me about something called a 'Cluster Method', which I've tried for a new work, but doesn't seem to be working out for me.

I like Uncle Jim's way, too. I did use an outline with the work I was talking about in my first post, but not quite as extensive as he would have used. My outline was very basic, kind of like what a preacher might use for a sermon. In other words, it was a simple outline with a sentence or two for each chapter.

Another thing I did, was to not put down either page numbers or chapter numbers. Rather, where chapters were supposed to go I stapled pages together. The idea there was that, if I had a chapter I wanted to insert into the middle of the story at a later time, I wouldn't be encumbered by previously-numbered chapters and have to figure everything out all over again.