I had a plan. A rough idea. An estimate of the number of words I planned to write and I kept at it everyday determined to hit that number. When I was at 20,000 words I said, “I’m almost halfway there.”
When I pushed through and reached 35,000 words I was nervous, because I felt like my story was starting to stall. I jumped to the last page, wrote out the ending and the two preceding chapters. That gave me a couple thousand more words, but now I had gaps. BIG gaps.
I wanted to close my laptop. I wanted to write something else, and I did, thinking maybe there was nothing left. I ignored my manuscript. Wrote a few chapters for another one. Surfed the Net. A lot. It didn’t help. The rest of the story just would not come.
After about three days of this, I finally got serious. I set a deadline. OMG!!! Why did I do that?
Well one thing I’ve learned about myself through work and school, is that I work better on a clock. I can procrastinate for weeks on end, but if I know, I have a deadline to meet, I get creative. I get inspired. I get serious. Because one thing I hate is the idea that I did not meet a goal.
I gave myself a month, which is not a lot of time at all, to keep myself honest and I put that date on my social media page (yikes). Two weeks later, I hit my original word count, but realized I was still missing a few chapters.
I’m another week closer (with a little less than a month to go) and I’m still at it, because now the words just won’t stop. I have to put a period on it. Get it edited and ready to release into the world. I think now this almost compulsive need to keep writing, is because I’m wondering did I say everything I wanted to say? Did the characters take the journey I envisioned for them. Do the words sound true? Will anybody feel anything.
Is it enough?
XoXo Aurora Levine 