First thing when I wake up I am writing. Today before I began I took some time to reflect on where I’m at, how it’s going and what I am doing.
Writing the first chapter with a purposeful patience isn’t easy but I’m happy with my progress at adopting this approach. There’s so much to address at the beginning with setting, character, themes, foreshadowing and tone. I want to include everything but in a spare way that introduces a time, place, world, and people without overwhelming the story itself.
Starting at the beginning of my story as I am gives some back story to the protagonist. To start the protagonist is a child, just for a few pages; those pages are shaping up nicely, childhood will hopefully be left behind very soon.
I’m cutting, pasting and rearranging so many words that it feels more like a game of scrabble than writing a novel. When all the juggling of word placement settles though I manage to experience those sweet spots where it flows and everything seems just right – then I realise that I need to squeeze a bit in between two paragraphs that run together and so the cycle continues…
Checking in with my conscious mind is necessary as the novel writing process has me communing between my conscious and subconscious which is as exhausting as it is satisfying. Chronicling the journey of my creative process here helps me get out of the stop and start progress of writing. The relief that I feel when I sit writing the journey of my novel knowing that it’s short, that it will end and will help me to keep going is aaaahhhhh … great. Writing these planning and progress updates are as helpful as going for a walk in the sunshine.
I am getting a lot done, writing, habit building, creating dopamine, engaging in my process.
The speed of this whole process is revealing itself to me and I’m coming to terms with the fact that I can only do so much. I’d really like to achieve more at once which I think is a symptom of having this project on the backburner for so many years. It’s been simmering away in my subconscious inhabiting my imagination and parodying itself in the modern-day world. I know it so well that I just want to magic it onto the page, but I am only human, and this is a disappointing reality that I’m digesting and humbly coming to terms with.
The content that I’m writing is growing and changing daily. I’m not rewriting, I’m tweaking.
The story is growing in ways that I couldn’t previously have conceived of but that make great sense within the context of the story bones and character development. I’m beginning to get an excitable anticipation when I write because I’m wondering what will happen next just like when reading a book written by another. I’ve experienced this before but not ongoing or on this scale as I journey through time and space with my protagonist.