Building castles out of sand

 

Photo by Emmanuel Acua on Unsplash

14,585! 

417 words written today. They crawled out, no, they danced out. All excited to explore this outside world that they'd heard about whilst they were waiting for their entrance in my imagination. 

That's the amount of words I wrote on Wednesday 28th, the day before, I'd written 327 words. But somehow, the word count kept growing!

This is from my morning writing time, and for a while the average was around 270 - 300 mark, but I'm delighted to see that something has changed! So what caused that you may be thinking, well. It's a combination of three things. 

Recently, I came across an article about giving yourself permission to write a bad first draft. This was incredibly helpful. For too long, I was losing belief in what I was writing, which was not helpful. Then on the 17th Feb, I attended The Sheffield Writers day, which was wonderful. Not only did I have great fun at a poetry writing workshop, and hearing an author been interviewed, I also attended a 'Writing your novel' masterclass. This was with two local authors - Russ Thomas and Susan Elliot-Wright Not only did this give me some great pointers, it also gave me motivation and belief, which is always helpful. 

But the biggest thing that has most helped me was reading this quote:

I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shovelling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” —Shannon Hale

When the words don't come or even worse, when I doubt the quality of what I'm writing, this quote is just what I need. Right now, I'm focussed on filling up that box. I can't wait till I get to 20,000 words because then, that box is a quarter full. Yes, there are times when the fears come saying 'I know nothing about police procedures' or Will people find it boring or even how do  you go about printing off 300 pages anyway? 

That will come later. Right now, I need to focus on filling up that box. Then, just like the picture shows, I can create a castle with turrets, and ramparts and a drawbridge and staircases, and a moat and a dragon and all kinds of intricate details, but without any sand, I can't build anything. 

I don't know who Shannon Hale is, but I'm hoping that at some point, I'll be able to thank her for giving me the motivation that I needed to finish my novel. 

One other thing that I've found essential is this - blank page. As I may have mentioned before, I use writer.zoho.com, which is helpful, but not only do I find all the frame around too noisy, I also can't resist correcting spelling or grammar mistakes as I go, which not only slows me down, but also pulls me out of the story that I'm telling myself, and that's not good. Not at all. 

I want to end by sharing two final quotes which I discovered from Matthew Fox's blogpost on famous writers sharing about their first drafts  

“The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.”  ―Terry Pratchett

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” — Kurt Vonnegut

 I know many of you have already written not only one novel, but many novels, so if you have any tips on getting though that first draft, then please do share them in the comments or on the Facebook pages. 

Hoping that I'll be able to hit that 20,000 word milestone soon!

All the best, 

Martin

Martin is a writer, baker, photographer and storyteller. He's been published in the ACW Christmas anthology and Lent devotional, and in four flash fiction anthologies He's currently honing his craft at flash fiction and you can find him on Twitter here.