Doubling down

I’ll finish a draft by the end of the year

Late last December I sent a friend and mentor a text — “I nearly have a sh*tty first draft of this novel I’ve been working on. And I mean sh*tty.”

I was looking to her for information about a seminar she’d mentioned for writers with completed drafts. I thought I was close enough to that status that it would be wise to see when the next one was scheduled. The previous year’s was held in January, so with a few weeks to go I figured I’d fatten up some chapters, finish maternity leave, start commuting to the office again, rough out a plan with my husband for how to run a household of four children and two working parents, then see if I could get into the class. 

Easy.

I’m smiling as I look back on that sweet, innocent person now. Putting aside the intensity of that transition and how I was not giving it the respect it deserved, my novel needed much more than a pillow stuffed under its shirt to plump up and count as a completed draft. It still does. 

So now I’m going to say something that I hope the me of six months from now doesn’t similarly smile and shake her head at. 

I am going to finish a draft of this novel by the end of the year. 

It would be glorious if it were a real, proper draft of a novel. But I would happily settle for a sh*tty first draft, too. 

I don’t know exactly how I will do this. I have a lot of words on the page already — about 75,000 — but they are not all the words I need, all the right words, or all in the right places. A lot of fulfilling this vow is not just adding more but cutting out, reordering, abandoning. It’s work that ideally requires more time and mental space than I have on a regular basis. But it just feels like it’s time to raise the stakes, to try and punch through to a new phase. 

I feel confident in what I wrote last week — that I’ve created a writing habit — despite skipping a couple days this week between being half blind from having my pupils dilated and attending a gazillion end-of-year school events (though sitting in a room while 11 children quietly knitted things for an hour could have been conducive to writing).

I hope that this habit is strong enough to hold the weight of whatever is necessary to hit this new goal. Summer is coming with its glorious and terrifying knack for undoing routines. I know losing the structure of school and childcare that we lean on so heavily will be another big moment of transition for our family. 

Yes, I can see the pattern and that it might be a foolish time to make another play at this, but I just don’t care right now. I’ll let six-months-from-now Susy decide about that. Right now I’m just going to go for it. 

Week 16: Making it up as I go 

Some everyday: No

Words:  344

See you next week.