My husband asked me the other day how far I am into my novel.
You know what? I couldn’t answer.
I had no idea–and that’s because I’ve been writing the scenes out of order (see previous blog post “Jump Around”).
Turns out that’s a good thing. Turns out there’s a side benefit to jumping around in the narrative: the book is less daunting to write.
Consider: a blinking curser at the top of a blank page, knowing you have 300 of those pages to fill.
Consider: a blinking curser at the top of a blank page knowing you have, at most, 20 pages to fill.
Since I’ve been jumping around in my narrative, I’ve been focused only on one scene at a time. I don’t feel the daunting pressure of having 250 more pages to write, 200 pages more to write, 198 more pages to write…
And I may not get to 300 pages. Maybe I’ll finish my rough draft with 200 pages. Or 195 or 276. I’ll just write the scenes I need to write and then stitch it together and see what I get. Without knowing exactly how many pages I’ve written, I find I’m not obsessing with it (“oh my God, I still have 80,000 words to write?!) It’s less about what I still have to do (a depressing emotion) and more about what I’m doing now (a much more fulfilling feeling).
There’s still a boatload more work to do–and that’s just for my rough draft, let alone revisions and editing and querying and marketing–but I kinda like not thinking about it. I kinda like not knowing exactly how much is ahead of me.
I kinda like this ignorance. I kinda like the bliss.
