In May of last year I alluded to the next project in the works for myself and asdf Publishing. With Much Love at last released to the public a few months prior, I was turning my sights toward my next book. This month I'm ecstatic to announce that the rough draft for Chasing Butterflies is complete and entering the editing phase. With two novels now written, it feels like a good time to step back and introspect about the process of writing. This isn't the next installment in our Writing Tips series as it doesn't have actionable advice for writing. Instead, this is an exploration of the act itself.
To provide a little context, I first began writing Much Love on December 22, 2012. Nearly two years later I'd written a somewhat respectable 11,977 words. It was enough that I felt committed to the book, but also so little that I realized I would never finish if I didn't devote myself to the task. So on October 23, 2014 I began the writing schedule that I've discussed at length in a previous blog post. From that point on I was aiming for 1,000 words per week, though the actual average was around 720 words. I also gave myself leeway to work on any writing project during that time, and in fact there were a number of weeks I actually worked on Chasing Butterflies. Still, by June 16, 2015 I had finished the rough draft for Much Love with a final word count of 30,635.
In contrast, if you're a long time reader of this blog you'll know that I began work on Chasing Butterflies in earnest on May 14, 2017. I had set 7,417 words to paper in the preceding years, and it felt like time to finish what I'd started. I didn't adhere to a strict schedule, and because of that my writing sessions tended to come few and far between. Even so, I averaged about 970 words per week. By December 29, 2017 I had finished the rough draft with 31,549 freshly penned words, which is nearly 1,000 more than the entirety of Much Love.
At this point I have to acknowledge that the process of writing Much Love was like pulling teeth. Based on the statistics above, I averaged 79 words per day on Much Love when I was working my hardest. Compare that to an average of 137 words per day during a similar period writing Chasing Butterflies. While it was a struggle to come up with 1,000 words for Much Love in an entire week, I would routinely pound out three times that many for Chasing Butterflies in a few hours.
So why am I belaboring this point? It's to highlight the two types of stories we write. On the one hand we have stories that we want to write. For me that was Chasing Butterflies. The actual process of writing it was a joy. On the other hand we have stories that we feel compelled to write. Much Love fell into that category. So which is better to write? Well, neither really. We all want to have a story that is exciting and fun to write; that's where the true joy of writing springs from. But we can never discount the stories that are difficult to tell yet feel the most important to us.
So I guess that's the real point here. As a writer you may find yourself laboring to finish a book, wondering why you're still chipping away at it. That can be a pretty disheartening experience. At the same time though, that will to persevere is a sign of how important the work is to you. Remind yourself of that. You would have given up a long time ago if the story didn't mean anything to you. You have to press on, and one day you'll see the story you cherished so much come to life.