Novel Blog - Writing The Great American Novel

Fifty-thousand words is a lot, no matter how you slice it.

I edited my high school newspaper and in college I spent the summers working for two local weekly newspapers. I can string some sentences together and people will read them, but writing a book length work is a whole different animal. I'm now on my third novel effort and you know what they say....I hope they are right!

I've completed 10,300 words at this point in fourteen first draft chapters. I have two more rough draft chapters in progress. I've made it farther this time and with more quality. Once I decided to stop worrying about being perfect and more about putting words on paper, I started progressing more quickly. I've learned that writing a book length work (in the beginning anyway) is more about quantity than quality. You can't start the second draft until you finish the first.

I hope I get to the point of publication someday, but I'm not going to worry about that too much now. I've got to get to the quantity before it's worth taking time to worry about the quality. With enough practice and dedication (and reading other writers' work), I think the quality will come around. I don't have a lot of leisure time for reading, so I've started getting books on tape from the library. For others in the same boat, I highly recommend it.