I've had a few good days with the writing of Novel 3, and thankfully I have reached my daily targets. Today wasn't such a great day, and I don't really know why, but nonetheless, I pushed myself to write as you so often have to. Yes, I know, I should be saying how wonderful it all is, and of course it does have it's wonders, but there are sticky points too!
It's a scary thing this writing lark, because you have to take a risk with it, write even when you're not sure what you're going to say, accept that you will rarely (if ever) get it right first time out, and that you will become frustrated with both yourself and the story as it unravels to the end.
I was given some good pieces of advice about writing the first draft of a novel, but two of them have stuck with me.
The first is 'to turn up'. By that I mean, to allocate time to write, and sit at your laptop, or notebook, and stay there even if you don't want to. If you've allocated 2-3 hours, you will eventually write something. A novel won't write itself, and even if it is only a couple of hundred words, you are further advancing the story.
The second piece of advice is to 'trust the process'. If you've written a novel before, you will know that you go through doubts, that you won't have the story line fully developed, that characters and words will come and go, and finally, when that lovely moment arrives and your words are ready to go off to be independent by getting printed in an actual book, you will know that you have written the best story you can, done the most with each of the characters, changed more words than you could ever comprehend, and learned stuff in the process.
So, I'm not going to beat myself up about a bad day. Fingers crossed it will be a lot better tomorrow, but either way, I'll turn up and I'll trust the process!
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