26373 / 50000 words. 53% done!
I’m catching up as best I can. If I do, I will have written over 6000 words this weekend, which is a nice pace indeed. Not too much that I can’t pay attention to what I’m writing, not too little that I don’t get anywhere fast. I just can’t make the daily writing. Not sure what to do about this in the future; will I always need to set up a NaNoWriMo-style goal to get through the month with an appropriate word count or whatnot?
I also spent today writing about 3000 words of re-doing beat sheets, modifying beats to better fit my characters’ clarified motivations and suchlike.
Everyone really does have their own way of writing, from what I’ve been reading of pro writers and suchlike. I feel better that I can’t seem to live up to some advice (write every day, for one), although I still feel guilty about being a not-good-enough writer to take up all good advice. If I’m actually going to be a writer, I need to be flexible enough to do that, right?
The girls in the basement say: no. What matters is that you write what’s right for you, and damn all the advice that doesn’t fit. While not hurting other people, of course.
And what’s right changes as you develop. Consider me a stupid n00b, who must explore because she can’t see what’s two feet in front of her nose at times.
Meanwhile, I’m using index cards again. 10 Hints for Index Cards helped me immensely to make use of this methodology that I’d always left alone because I tried to fit too much onto the little things. Instead I’m now boiling down each chapter into its main, main action in around 7 words. This has helped a lot in getting a bird’s eye view of the plot, even for me. Scrivener’s corkboard’s suddenly now way more useful.
I’m also making use of ideas prompted by Adrienne Kress’s post on reluctant readers. For instance, my chapters, I’ve decided, will be short, roughly one scene long. My scenes are coming in at over 2000 words per each, so with 20 such chapters I’m hitting the 40k mark I need to qualify for John Klima’s line-edit, though not enough to win NaNoWriMo. Dunno what I’ll do for filler, but I may end up with more chapters through adding extra complexity as per Scott Westerfeld’s pep talk. I’ve already used it to end up at 20; I can hit 25, I feel.
That was quite a lot of text.
Spontaneous ∂erivation 
Thanks for the suggestion – I revisited the idea of index cards (one of the reasons I bought Scrivener). I keep trying to incorporate new stuff. Some sticks.
Must be one of those differences between writers, though, because I NEVER rearrange scene order. Ok, almost never – but if I do, the distance a scene moves is miniscule, ie, I put two scenes in reverse order if they were nearly simultaneous in time, and rearrange the timeline a bit so one character comes first instead of second. I’m tied to a timeline.
I wouldn’t even know how to begin laying all the cards out and rearranging their order.
But I did use cars to WRITE. Once the timeline was in order and the scenes listed, each one went onto its own card, and it was easy to see how far I was from the end by which card was currently on the desk being turned into a scene, and the other cards were pinned to the board so I could use them for reference as to where the other bits were.
Everyone works differently – or it would all be an easy formula to follow. Contrary to the opinion of those who give out formulas, they don’t work for everyone. The trick is to find someone who thinks like me, but already worked the details out for our common method. Then I follow happily and am grateful for the path.
Congrats on the progress.