Epic Fail

Okay, I admit it. This heading is just a shameless ploy to get attention. Well, yes I have failed in my goal to reach 80,000 words by the end of March, or at least I will. There is no way I will write another 15,000 words by the end of the month. But still epic fail is a bit harsh I guess.

I am very disappointed. Towards the end of February and early March I went through a very despondent period where I thought the book was never going to get written. I am told this happens to a lot of authors at some point but that doesn’t make it any less depressing. In any case, like we all have to do sometimes, I picked myself up and just got on with it. My daily word counts are still woeful; I am lucky to write 100 words a day at the moment. But they all add up, right?

So why has this happened. Well once again, I got to the end of my story with only a little over 60,000 words. It is not as if there shouldn’t be enough content to write 80,000 words. After all the story spans almost 100 years. But this meant I needed to go back and start from the beginning to see where more detail needed to be added. This can be an incredibly depressing process when you don’t have enough words to begin with. It becomes part of the editing process, which means that not only are words being added to the manuscript but I am also finding that there are words that need to be removed. Hence the very low daily word count.

How lucky are those people who overwrite and have to delete words. I would be glad to kill my darlings* if it meant my word count was too high.

I just have to continually remind myself that failure is not the end of the road, just a detour. What can I learn from this?

*for those who aren’t writers, to kill your darlings means to delete parts of your story that you think are just amazing but really don’t have a place in the story.