Author Archives: Wendy Bradley

The Bad Draft keeps growing

11761 is the overall total now: 1027 new words today.  One of the incidents I wrote last week occurs too early in the story, so I’ve gone back a bit and I’m now filling in the intervening incidents.  But I’m still using the technique of a fresh Write or Die document to do the words, pasting them into the end of a master Word file, and then at some point I’ll copy it all to Scrivener, play around with the scene divisions, and get the scenes into the right order.

But that comes later.  FIRST, I want to lay down a serious number of words.  It’s a new technique for me, but so far it seems to be bearing fruit.  We’ll see what a hundred thousand words of Bad Draft looks like at the end of the day!

Week three

… and I crossed the 10,000 word barrier!  Yay me!

 

Today’s numbers:

  • This morning’s words:    1,162
  • Total words to date:      10,734

I am really pleased with how it’s going.  (But not pleased enough to start publicising this blog just yet!)

Week two ends here

I was slightly disappointed yesterday that I only put in 300 or so words through a combination of getting up late and having an early meeting, and I never came back and finished the day’s tally.  So this morning I put in the full 1000 words and a few more, but the overall total hasn’t crept up to 10k quite yet.  Maybe over the weekend.  Onwards and upwards!

  • Today’s words:       1134
  • Total words:            9573

Reading what I’ve written

This morning was a slow start: I’m still sitting at the breakfast table at 10.31 in the morning!  However, I did it – I found that using “write or die” rather than simply opening a new word document as I have done the last couple of days helped a lot.  I also started off by reading through the words I’d written so far and reassuring myself that, even though there is repetition and filler and some material that needs to go elsewhere in the next draft, nevertheless this IS a first draft, growing at a remarkable rate!

  • Today’s words:       1078
  • Total words:             8060

Week Two

Hmm… are we counting weekends?  I have calculated my 100,000 words on the basis that I will do 1,000 words a day except for weekends so perhaps not.  Anyway, here I am at the start of week two.  I did an odd 90 words on Saturday morning and then today was a bank holiday – and the World Snooker final.  So I didn’t open up Write or Die today, but threw a few words into a fresh document in between frames and inched my way towards the day’s total.

I’ve just finished (which is good, because the final is getting to be awesome!) and here’s my score:

  • Today’s words:   1182
  • Total words:        6201

Day four

Yesterday was a complete fail of a day, but even so I added 90 words.  Back to the breakfast table routine this morning, and here we are.

Today’s numbers:

  • Words written today:               1035
  • Total words:                                   5027

Day Two

Hmm… completely forgot I had said I would do my morning words at the breakfast table, but then had a thunderclap moment when I sat down at my desk to do some other work and instead did my morning pages first.

Today’s scores:

  • Today’s words     1019
  • Total words          3887

The eagle eyed among you will notice that today’s words added to yesterday’s total words don’t add up to today’s total words.  This is because the “today’s words” figure is the “write or die” count, and the “total words” count is the pages/word count of the document where I cut and paste them after the time is up.  Why they don’t add up… well, I don’t think I care enough to find out, just yet anyway.

 

Day One

I decided to try using Write or Die first thing in the morning, while I’m having my breakfast.  So this morning I wrote 1081 words – they were bad words, an incoherent and unsatisfactory attempt at a key scene, but nevertheless they were written.

  • Words for today: 1081
  • Total words: 2873

100 days

The thing is, I’ve been talking about writing a novel since I was eleven.

The thing is, I took a year off work and wrote a novel.  Call it my Villette.  It’s OK, but it’s not Jane Eyre.

The thing is, I’ve had these characters and settings and stories in my head for years and I keep noodling about them but not committing to writing them down.

The thing is, the way to write a good novel, is to write a bad novel first and then work on it.

So here’s what I’m going to do.  I’m going to write a thousand words – probably a thousand bad words (not BAD words, you understand – I’m not going to write a list of swearwords.  Just unfiltered words) every day.  I’m going to write a thousand unfiltered, unedited, uncareful bad words every day.  For 100 days.  So by the end of 100 days I will have a really really bad 100,000 word manuscript.

And then I can do some real work.

If I take the weekends off, I’ll be finished by September 15th.  Ready?  Go!