Novel problems

I am very conscious of my page count on my novel.

Each time I open it out (which is incidentally daily at the moment), I stare at the little number in the corner.

My husband doesn't get page counts. He prefers to know my number of words (he's such a student). But I was beginning to think he had the right idea.

Because for a long time the page count wasn't growing.

The first reason was usually because I wasn't writing!

The second reason was because I was editing, and therefore words would go up or down or stay the same and I could put hours in and there would not be a difference.

But slowly that is changing. Each week it goes up. Not by much, one, two, maybe three pages at a time.

But it is going up.

This week I started working on the order of a few sections, and I mercilessly cut out a bit that I had written in the first few months of writing. So often when I'm re-reading something I wrote long ago I end up scrawling underneath the mantra of the novelist "Show don't tell, show don't tell". Don't just describe things, don't just explain things. Use the narrative and the characters movements to let the reader know what they need to know. So I had long ago written a "show" version of my "telling" passage- but had not removed the original.

I removed it on Monday.

2 pages down the tube.

It was very discouraging.

But to my amazement as I kept on plugging away I replaced those pages that day. And added on a few more.

At the end of last year I decided that I would set myself the goal of getting the first draft of this novel done by the end of this year. And at various different points during the months proceeding this one I've assumed that I had bitten off more than I could chew and that there was no way it was possible. But I now think I can do it.

I printed out a section of my story so I could work out the order of some random interactions of characters that I had plonked together, and so that I could work out the "gaps" that need to be filled to make the narrative come together. I stared at the pages in horror. I had loved measuring things in terms of pages- it made me feel like my end wasn't far away. But as I looked at how many words and lines constituted a "page" I was in shock. There was so little. Perhaps I hadn't written as much as I thought.

Then as I read it, I realised something was odd.

Our printer had been cutting off a paragraph at the bottom of every page.

Phew.

135 pages

38,508 words

love B