Negative Word Count

I told a bit of a lie in my last update about my current project. I said I was 57% through writing the first draft. I'm actually doing a hybrid writing/revision pass of the first draft.

I wouldn't normally recommend anyone do this. There is a danger that revising as you write can turn into a perpetual revision pass without ever finishing the first draft. We writers can get stuck in a loop, trying to make everything perfect before moving on. It is the death of many a project, the reason so many people get stuck writing and rewriting the first few chapters.

If you notice a problem, you can usually flag it somehow in the manuscript so that you can go back and "fix it in post." The first draft is about momentum, or filling the sandbox with sand so that you can adjust the shape later on.

Like all writing advice, it's better to understand what something does than to insist on never doing it. Along those lines, I realized that I was having structural problems with Wake the Gods. It was heading toward a conclusion that wasn't going to satisfy me. Rather than plow ahead and have to do a major overhaul, scrapping most of the bones of the story, I decided to go through and fix what I could now, before the first draft was complete.

I'm sure either option would work fine, but this felt better for me at the moment, and sometimes that feeling is the most important part of a creative project.

I keep track of every writing session. What this means during my hybrid writing/revision is that I sometimes have fewer words at the end of the day than what I started with. But sometimes that negative word count is actually progress in the right direction.