Last Updated on March 23, 2013
A while back, I decided to set December 1st as the date by which I would finish the first draft of my novel.
I don’t know why I chose that date. I really can’t imagine.
I’ve mentioned, when I’ve brought up the subject of the ambitious National Novel Writing Month event that it would never be an option for me as long as I work in television because November is a sweeps month, which means my workload doubles…and that’s sometimes a conservative estimate.
So why I’d put pressure on myself to be finishing up the first draft of my novel during a sweeps month is just beyond me. If I was a drinking man, I’d say I had been blitzed at the time.
In any case, I won’t finish the first draft by then. That’s bad news, in a way, but there’s good news behind it. I’ve started writing a short story. It has nothing to do with the novel, it’s just a story that I’ve been contemplating for a while with no real direction of where it would go once it began. For that reason, I never tried to start writing it. All of a sudden, an idea hit me. So I thought about it and decided I’d try to write it and see what happens.
What amazes me isn’t so much that the idea came to me after staying hidden for so long; the part that surprises me is that it’s a short story that I’m trying to write. Since I wrote my first novel back in college — that terrible one that will never see the light of day — I never could really write a short story. I would try to make it too long, as if it were a chapter of a novel, or I’d get more and more uncomfortable as I “compressed” time to keep it as a short story. Either way, writing a short story wasn’t comfortable.
I marvelled at those who could so easily go back and forth from one to the other, novel to short story to novel, with no difficulty whatsoever. Now, without any warning at all, it would appear that I’ve suddenly “remembered” how to write a short story again.
That is, if it turns out to be anything.
I’m going to keep December 1st as my deadline, but I’ll make it the deadline for finishing the short story. Maybe that one won’t be as hard to meet.
It’s nice of you to ask, James.
I did finish the first draft of the short story…I’ve just been slow to update my sidebar.
It’s now December 16. Did you finish novel or short story yet?
So did you finish your novel?
Not yet. The short story is in progress, though.
So did you finish your novel?
All writing is an act of faith. Novel writing requires faith and insanity in unequal proportion.
In a few more weeks my novel Randham Acts will be published. I began writing it in 1989. More than once I tried turning my back on the idea, but it stuck.
Keep writing! And kudos on setting a deadline for yourself that cannot be justified with anything other than metaphysics!
Good luck on the short story. Short stories intimidate me more than novels. So many editors seem to think they are the same beast and that a person who can write a novel should have to prove they can write a short story first. I’ve never understood that.
Deadlines seem useful at times, but Lord, can they ever bite you in the butt. It’s like, you get there, and how do you punish yourself if you miss the deadline? Not an easy thing to answer. From the sounds of things, you needed a time out from your book anyway, so tackling that short story sounds like a good idea. Hope it turns out well!