Hunting Demons: Finding Momentum not 10K

It is funny how we come to things. Trying to write ten thousand (10k) words in a day was a consequence of needing to kick myself out of a ponderous editing compulsion. A single day word count goal that would prove beyond me, as it happens. But I had guessed that from the outset, having calculated it would take me over eight hours of non-stop typing at twenty words per minute, with no pondering, or breaks or anything to achieve it.

But I wanted to see what I could achieve in a day of flat out writing. Especially as I needed to get my arse in gear with a deadline looming.

Before starting on the day I planned the medium term goals of the characters and the story. And then I began. I wrote in three sessions of three hours. Managing on average 1.2k words per session. Totalling just under 4k for the whole day. I stopped just before 9PM having written myself to a standstill. An expected fail you might think, but a funny thing happened during the day.

A novel is a strange beast. It is nothing like any other writing medium. It is focused on the moment to moment and at the same time it is a dauntingly huge canvas of interlinked threads, most of which are layered deep into the moment and only realised as we move between these moments. A lot of the links won't even be neatly tied off when the first draft is finished.

And in the four years since finishing the first draft of Chasing Innocence, I'd forgotten about those interlinking threads. As I built momentum through the 10k day they started to form, wildly branching out the more I wrote. It was incredibly thrilling realising the shift from ponderous editing to full on novel writing. This is what I got most from the day, that once my characters feel real and I know where I'm going, it is momentum that will fill the canvas and build the core elements of the book I'm trying to write.

Here are a few other observations I made during the day:

I thought in trying to write a lot in one day I might overwrite - the actual output if anything was lean. It will be built on, with additional colour edited into the core story. It will change by percentages, getting swapped about, added to, moved or dropped. I do think those percentages are considerably less than I might have expected.

Dialogue was fully realised within the needs of the story as it currently stands. There were some nuances, emotion and character inflections built around the dialogue but only those that helped the characters speak as I progressed. Once more additional colour and drama will be layered, again in lesser percentages than I expected.

By writing with momentum I was far more creative in how I told the story than I would be in ponderous mode. I think this is important for me at least in my thriller mission statement.

If I realised I needed to change previous content as I wrote, I only went back if it helped build the story. If it was just an edit I made a note and continued.

I have to see the physical environment in my mind to tell the story, so if I can't I have to stop and mentally build it. This I had to do twice during the day. Better planning would have overcome this. I knew I was going to be in these environments but realised while writing I needed more geographic detail.

Huge fun.

Shout out to Melissa Foster for providing the inspiration to attempt a 10k day.