Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Drip, drip, drip

Some days I wonder if I even deserve to be called an author.

My latest work in progress is going slowly. Understatement. Between family stuff, illness, day job, and the summer doldrums, that last glob of ketchup is sliding out of the bottle faster than the words are moving from my brain into my word processor.

That doesn’t mean I’ve made no progress at all. It’s just that it’s in such small dribs and drabs it’s hard to see that I’m getting anywhere. Yet the book I’m currently writing is actually at 60,000 words on its way to a projected 75,000.

I keep track of my daily word count and from that I can see that I’ve been working on this book for eight months now. My daily word counts are pathetic. Four hundred words some days; two hundred, six hundred. A couple of good days I went over a thousand each day. Some days, less than a hundred.

Yet even at that pace I’ve managed to write four-fifths of the book.

I think the point isn’t that it’s going so slowly. The point is that it is going. I may not get much done each day, but I keep at it. I keep chipping away. And even at a few hundred words a day, a new novel is emerging.

-- Katherine Kingston

1 comment:

N.J.Walters said...

Somedays getting any words down on paper is a victory. Slow and steady is better than nothing at all.

You're absolutely right when you say the point is to keep going. Good advice!