Word Count Wednesday: Why?

I am finding the blog to be a real benefit to me. I know a few people have told me they enjoy watching this writing process from afar (thanks, Mom), but I really don’t know if it is benefitting anyone except me.

Maybe that is enough. I have found accountability to be the greatest benefit in drafting this blog so far. I made a commitment to share my experience drafting this second novel by posting something every week. I have to work on my book or I will have nothing to post.

I started the blog to share my experiences, decisions, obstacles I overcome, and so forth in drafting a novel. I am now off to a good start on the book. It is taking shape and I am writing daily. I don’t want the blog to become the focus of my writing.

I still want to share the process with anyone interested. I think I can do that through a once a week format. So why Word Count Wednesday?

Most of the novels I enjoy are roughly 80,000 words in length. I expect this book to be about the same. When I created my story map, I tried to break the story down into meaningful pieces. I want to grab my reader in the opening pages.

I remember reading the book Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier when I was in high school. I thought it would be great to read a story about someone who shared my name. That was a big disappointment. Let’s just say the title character was someone without character! Anyway, I still enjoyed the story. It was intriguing and remains a favorite in its genre. Now though, I will admit that for at least the first two times I read the book, I skipped the first chapter. I just couldn’t get into it. I didn’t like the heavy descriptive tone. (Yes, I read books I like over and over.)

I don’t want my readers to be bored. They may not have spent their lunch money on the book as I did and feel the same commitment to push past the first chapter in the hope it gets better.

My plan is to introduce my main characters and set up the story line in the first 10,000 words. By the time I reach 20,000 words I hope to have a major turning point in my story, a problem to be resolved. The next 40,000 words will be where my characters can explore the options to resolving the problem and I suspect there is a subplot in there as well. In the final 20,000 words, I need to bring it all together.

I guess when I break it down that way it does sound boring. I hope not. Each Wednesday I will report where I am in the word count and what I am doing.

So where am I now?  9,402 words.  Next week I'll tell you how I've spent them.