If you’ve been following my Novel Updates Series then you already know the story: I’m writing a novel that takes place at a grad school writing program in the Midwest, and for the last year and a half I’ve been buried in the revision process—you know, that part where you go back and edit everything you’ve written until it’s actually turns out good.
Last year I finished pen and paper edits for the third draft, and a few months after starting my Secret Office Day Job I started typing them up, page for page and line for line. Because I’ve been busy, it was taking a REALLY long time, which is why I started posting updates here to keep myself on track.
Well two days ago, at around 11:00pm, I finally finished typing. That’s right: the third draft is officially done.
This is where you’d expect me to be ecstatic, thrilled, bursting with pride over my enormous achievement, and all that kind of crap—but the thing was, after finishing, I didn’t feel that different, and just kinda wanted to go to bed.
The moment shouldn’t have felt as anticlimactic as it did—after finishing earlier drafts of both this novel and my first one, I always experienced that fist-clenching, confidence-boosting, all-around kick-ass feeling of having just done something awesome. This time there was none of that…instead, I found myself thinking about something else:
WHY IN THE HOLY NAME OF FUCK DID IT TAKE ME SIX MONTHS TO RETYPE EDITS ON A 300 PAGE FUCKING NOVEL????????
To put things in perspective, typing up the second draft of this novel took me just under six weeks—and that was typing out every word from scratch to reacquaint myself with the pages. This draft took me six months to type up, and that’s not even counting the three months in between drafts where I didn’t work on it at all.
There’s a lot of reasons for this: one is that I’ve been working on other projects, both creative-based (like writing an awesome chapbook story about working in Japan), and other-real-life-stuff-that-has-to-get-done-based (like moving into a new apartment and buying a bunch of stuff that goes along with it, like fresh-scented cleaners and hand soap).
By far the biggest reason, though, is that for the first time in four years I’m working a full-time job that doesn’t involve being a grad student, and this takes up a HUGE portion of my time and energy, which leaves me with less focused time every week for novel work.
I don’t like this—in fact, I actively dislike it, and more often now I get the feeling that my current setup isn’t working for me the way it should, especially when my main goal is to finish this novel and start pitching it to agents. (Sorry Day Job Blog, but you’ll always be Number Two.)
The slow progress has made me think a lot about how I structure my time over the mid- to long-term, which is why I wrote about sacrifices last week. It’s easy to push back a long-term project like a novel to work on stuff with more immediate deadlines, which for me is everything from editing assignments to making the weekly grocery list. Typing up novel edits usually occupied the last item in my daily To-Do list, and that’s if I even got to it at all.
I’ve been working on a plan to fix this problem for a while, even if it’s just a way to buy a few months of not having to work a full-time Day Job, since that’s the structure that allowed me to revise the second and third novel drafts last year over the course of about nine months. While that structure had its problems (mostly that it didn’t pay enough), it did provide me with a TON of writing time, and back then I don’t think I realized how valuable that was.
This means that I’m really struggling with two different but related problems:
- How to make the most of the writing time I have now while working a full-time Day Job, and
- How to restructure my routine so that I’m no longer working a full-time Day Job (in terms of hours per week, or total hours per year)
I make the distinction between Day Job Hours Per Week and Per Year because I’ve had jobs where I worked ridiculous amounts of overtime (i.e., here and here), but these marathon runs always tapered off eventually into slower periods, which is when I got most of my creative work done. And those slower periods made a big difference.
But then again, I also can’t completely abandon the writing time that I have now to plan a new structure for the future, because that’s how procrastination happens (“Oh of course I’ll get to work on the novel as soon as I quit my job next year!” etc.) and causes me to lose steam. I believe pretty strongly in developing good work habits now, which is what I want to keep doing.
So again I find my time divided between 1)Continuing work on the novel, and 2)Trying to find that new structure that’ll help me make even more progress. This sucks, because once again it leaves me with multiple directions to focus on instead of really settling on one.
I won’t say much about what that new structure might look like for secrecy reasons, but it’s definitely something I’ve been moving toward for a while—and of course, if I can pull it off, you can bet that I’ll be blogging about it here to share the hype ;-)
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