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It’s the second week of January, and I’ve made good on one of my New Year’s goals: aiming to write at least 1,500 words per week. Yes, it’s only a little more than a week into the new year, but it feels good to be making steady progress. I’ve been working on my novel almost every single day, and I manage to hit at least 500 words each day, moving me well past that 1,500-words-per-week goal.
It hasn’t always been so easy to hit that weekly goal. For a while, I was really struggling with getting into the novel-writing flow. My biggest obstacle? I was constantly stopping and doing research for every little thing. If my character was going into a police station, I would stop and then search online for my town and try to see what the police station looked like. If a character had a drug overdose, I wanted to stop and look up which drug she would be using, and exactly how much you would need to take for an overdose, and what the effects of an overdose would be (as you can tell, I’m certainly not well-versed in drug use or abuse).
My writing stalled with this stop-start tug of war, and I was making so little progress. I was getting discouraged. That’s why I am so glad that I read through and finished Stephen King’s On Writing. He specifically addresses the topic of research for fiction. The number one thing about your fiction writing is story. Story above all else. Background is fun, but does it push forward the story? And research is just background. It might be fun to do that research, and it might be fun to write up the results of that research, but it’s guaranteed to make your story feel constipated and bloated.
A reader doesn’t care exactly what protocol a small-town police department follows to interrogate a suspect in a story about secret societies run amuck. That reader wants to find out whether or not the main character is going to be seduced by the exotic mysteries of midnight orgies meant to summon unspeakable wealth and power (not that that’s what my book is about, or is it?). Now, I might want to do research after that first draft just to make sure that I wasn’t embarrassing myself, but not in that first draft. Not when I wanted to keep that initial story freely flowing.
When I read that, I felt free. I had been imprisoned by the idea that I should write what I know, and only what I know. Well, what I know is how to copyedit. I know how to read. I know about good food. But I didn’t any details about actual secret societies. I didn’t know what the inside of a particular historical landmark looked like or whether the furniture inside was Seventeenth Century or Early Baroque. I didn’t know how long a hospital would keep you if you exhibited overdose symptoms but no actual evidence of any drug use. But I did know (or was getting to know) my characters, and I did know about the situation they were in and what they were doing to muddle through it.
That’s what I needed to focus on to get that first draft down. Once I got that into my head, I felt tremendous freedom when I sat down for each writing session. I was no longer second-guessing every story decision I made. I was simply becoming a scribe who was transcribing the story that was forming in my head. And it was marvelous.
The other obstacle I kept hitting my head against was the idea that my actual story idea wasn’t any good. I had started out thinking it was going to be a copyediting detective story. A whodunit solved by a detail-oriented copyeditor who noticed details that no one else picked up on. And it certainly started that way. But, as I started to let my writing process go wild, the characters started to interact in lively and organic ways and not at all in the planned-out plot that I had been trying to shoehorn them into. They wanted to explore mysterious letters that appeared at their workplace. They wanted to give in to sudden and unexpected attractions that arose in unlikely places. They wanted to be seduced by mysterious secret societies.
And I let them.
And then I started to doubt myself.
And that’s where another lesson that King taught in his writing book helped me to keep going:
“I battle doubts all the time about whether or not this thing is working or that thing’s working, whether or not the idea is good. The one thing that I never really doubted is the language, the ability to put the words together.”
—Stephen King, On Writing
The language. I knew how to string together my words into wonderfully surprising sentences and paragraphs. I knew how to make the ideas sing as they flowed from my mind and onto my digital paper. I knew how to do that, so I let myself do it without worrying about whether or not the idea was good. Not for this first draft. I was going to let the ideas flow freely.
And it’s been wonderful. I’m feeling very confident that I’ll be able to accomplish my goal of finishing the first draft of my novel this year. It’s taken me nearly fifty years to get here, but it feels so good now that I’m finally here.