Goals

Been writing more of that story, which is good.  Yet, it makes me think about where I want to stop and let that editor go at it.  There are all kinds of advice that run through my head and there are two points that come close to it, I think.

One goal while I was in school was to get to fifty pages by the end of the semester.  I was going to CSULB and taking a creative writing novel course.  The prevailing wisdom was that if you could get the story to fifty pages, then it had a chance to be a real and true novel.  Yes, the scenes might not all be there and the writing might be horrendous, yet it was a good goal for me.  (It was also a way to thin out some of those who thought that this would be an "easy" class.  I took the class many times, mostly because I had far to many units from previous schools and was trying to take advantage of working on a novel in these classes.)  It was pretty easy for me to get to fifty pages.  Yet, the semester would end and I would go off and forget my manuscript to work on something else or to knock off the writing for a few days.  (THAT is also the subject of another blog.  Hopefully I remember to come back to it.)  So, when school started up again, I would need to find a new project.

The other goal was from something I read by Terry Pratchett in The Writer's Guide to Fantasy Literature.  He talked about something called a "Draft Zero."  This was the draft no one saw, only he did.  And, the main goal of this was to get the manuscript to eighty pages.  Once again, not everything was where it should be or well written, but the meat of the story was there.  Once that was done, he could start in on a actual "First Draft" and start the editing process.

I think I might try for the full eighty pages.  Once that gets done, I can start at the beginning again and at least attempt to edit the thing.

There is one thing that does come to mind though.  Since I have been working on this for many years and the drafts have built up and built up, do I really need to get to that eighty?  Should I stop sooner?  Or should I even keep going longer?  What if I hit eighty pages and I don't want to stop?  What if I keep going and this "Draft Zero" is actually something like two hundred pages?  Granted, that might not happen, but I am a writer and love to play the what if game.

I suppose I will keep going until I think I have reached the end of the story.  Whether that is at fifty pages, eighty pages or even two hundred.

Until next time...