Imagine that last April, almost exactly a year ago from today, you began your current novel project, Songs for Piano and Voice. A departure from your first novel, it’s a contemporary romantic dramedy about a pianist and a singer who just can’t quite get their relationship in tempo thanks to an ex, a nosy pastor’s wife, a smothering older sister, a drug addict, and romantic rivals. It’s set at a fictional Methodist church in Waco, Texas, and in the very real Baylor University School of Music, where you yourself spent a semester studying vocal performance — though the story’s not based on personal acquaintances or experiences. Much. (Though who knows? Maybe if you hadn’t changed your major to English literature, it would be autobiographical. Ah, the endless drama of musicians!)
In a year, you’ve written sixteen chapters, totaling upwards of 80,000 words. You’re either two-thirds or half of the way finished with your first draft. You’re not really sure which. All you know is that you’ve finished the first of two “movements” and at this point have no way of gauging how long the second will be. You know the end of the novel — the end was actually the starting point of the whole thing — and you know the major plot points between the first movement and the end. But only the actual writing will tell just how long it will take to get from here to there. Or how to get from here to there. Which scares you a little, because writing blind is the surest way to write yourself into a corner, though you did manage to avoid that with the first 80,000 words, which you also wrote blindly till you got to the end.
80,000 words sounds like a lot to a non-writer. Or even to a writer. Until you break it down into the number of days you work per year and get something like an average of 450 words per day. And then you think about the other writers you know, who have written entire 100,000 word novels in 100 days, and then you start to wonder what the heck you’re doing wrong. (Or maybe they’re doing something wrong?) So it’s best not to think about other writers or break it down into numbers and averages, and instead just revel in the fact that this year you’ve written 80,000 words that a couple of other writer friends really like, and, even more importantly, that you like (or at least don’t think are utter crap), and oh thank God that terrible eighteen month dry spell that followed your first novel is long gone!
For now, you can spend seven nights and eight days at Walt Disney World, and worry about increasing your average daily word count when you get back.