Great! Now do it all over again.
Monday, December 6th, 2010 01:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lizvogelSomething I did not expect: Starting a second novel is a lot harder than finishing the first one. It's not the problem I've heard other authors talk about, of having set yourself a standard to live up to and to prove the first one wasn't just a fluke. I seem to be safe on that one; I know I can do it again, because I've done it before.
No, what's throwing me is the frankly intimidating amount of work on the to-be-done side of the scale. Past a certain point on the first novel (around chapter 9 or so), the sheer weight of words-already-written provided a momentum for writing the rest that was almost irresistible; I couldn't really see not finishing it, having already gotten that far. It's a bit like pushing a rock; once you get over the crest of the hill, it's less a question of struggling to push and more a matter of running as fast as you can to keep the work you've already done from squashing you flat. But now this new rock is sitting at the base of a very big hill, it's got inertia on its side, and it sure looks like a long, long way up there....
Using word count as my metric for productivity doesn't make this any easier. The prospect of writing 15,000 words doesn't sound so bad when you've already got 50,000 words done. The prospect of writing 60,000+ when you've got a base of only about 500, however, is more than a little disconcerting.
No, what's throwing me is the frankly intimidating amount of work on the to-be-done side of the scale. Past a certain point on the first novel (around chapter 9 or so), the sheer weight of words-already-written provided a momentum for writing the rest that was almost irresistible; I couldn't really see not finishing it, having already gotten that far. It's a bit like pushing a rock; once you get over the crest of the hill, it's less a question of struggling to push and more a matter of running as fast as you can to keep the work you've already done from squashing you flat. But now this new rock is sitting at the base of a very big hill, it's got inertia on its side, and it sure looks like a long, long way up there....
Using word count as my metric for productivity doesn't make this any easier. The prospect of writing 15,000 words doesn't sound so bad when you've already got 50,000 words done. The prospect of writing 60,000+ when you've got a base of only about 500, however, is more than a little disconcerting.
