Over 113,500 words. The longest first draft of a novel I have ever written. I feel really good about this one. I burned it on a CD and took it to Office Depot to get it printed out. Three hundred pages. I started this draft November first. It was, of course, a NaNoWriMo novel. That fifty-three days to write 113.5k words, or about 2140 words a day. How is that possible? Well, it's not high quality at this point. The trick of producing a first draft is to spew, and worry about making it better later.
There are a lot of problems with this draft, of course. Plenty of little details that changed as the novel went on: the age of a character, an action I referred to later that never happened earlier. These are the types of things that are easily fixed. And of course, plenty of word errors, which are a by product of using Microsoft Word and the spelling auto-correct feature. I am writing fast enough that I don't notice when Word corrects my spelling to a word that I did no intend. Also something easily corrected in the rewirte phase.
What is not easy to do, is to improve it now that it is on paper. The main things that are missing are the images that help convey my meaning to the reader. Finding just the right image is difficult and slow work.
What now? All the advice says to let it sit for awhile - a month maybe. I probably won't wait that long. After the holidays I'll probably start reading it and marking the obvious errors, and try to get the overview that is missing when you work on it for almost two months.
What is it about? Well, I haven't written the one line teaser yet. It's a story of a high school senior during desegregation in South Carolina in 1970.
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