With the month of January comfortably past the half-way point, but still close enough to the “New Year” that my mind continues to reflect on plans for the year ahead, I thought now would be a good time to discuss my thoughts, plans and goals for writing in 2024. I set out the year with high expectations, coming out of 2023 with a lot of success, in personal terms: which is to say, as I previously reported, last year was my single best year with regard to writing productivity since I started tracking it in 2012. But 2023 is hindsight. Let’s look ahead to my goals for this year.
The “Goal” is relatively simple: I intend to finish my rough draft of “The Book of M” in 2024. More specifically, I hope to get to the end by the close of June. And what do I need to do in order to achieve that goal? I ended 2023 with about 240,000 words completed on my novel. I now estimate that the complete first draft will reach its conclusion with between 275,000 and 285,000 words – call it 280,000 for simplicity. That means, to reach the end, I need to write an additional 40,000 words.
If I have another year like 2023, that’ll be easy to accomplish. But I’ve set my goal to be ambitious. I want to do 40,000 words in just six months. That means I need to write, on average, about 6,667 words per month to finish by the end of June.
That’s going to be a tough goal to beat. But I’m off to a great start!
As of the time of this writing in mid-January, I’ve already written an additional 5,692 words in the novel. That’s ahead of my pacing at this point in the month in 2023. At this rate, I just need to dedicate another hour to an hour and a half to writing before the end of January to meet the 6,667-word goal. In the whole month of January 2023 I actually wrote a total of 7,118 words. I think I can beat that mark in January 2024.
Even if I can’t beat last year’s pacing, I’m still easily on track to finish this novel by the end of August or September at the latest. But I really believe I can do this: I can finish it by the end of June.
That said: finishing the first draft really means I’ve only scratched the surface of turning around a finished novel. This is going to take several drafts to fix plot holes, ramp up characterization, and polish the prose. I’m still at the beginning of the journey.
Now conventional wisdom has it you should put that first finished novel in a drawer and go work on something else for a while before coming back to it to do edits and rewrites. But opinions vary on just how long one should keep the novel out of sight before your eyes and mind are fresh enough to tackle the editing project.
I’m not even sure what “something else” I would turn to working on would be. Probably transcribing old handwritten story notes into documents stored in the cloud. But at the end of the day, I just know I’m going to be eager to get into the thick of editing the first draft.
I mean, the fact is, it’s been 10 years since I really took a good look at the first dozen scenes of this book. I think I can approach those early parts of the book with a pretty clear-eyed take. I know there’s a ton of work to be done there. And, as I pushed on with the rough draft, I intentionally left a trail of breadcrumbs, in the form of document comments where I realized that I would need to change something later.
Basically: I give it two weeks, a month tops, before I’m ready to start editing.
The plan, therefore, is this: assuming I finish the rough draft in June as planned, then I take most of the month of July “off” from the novel (likely, as I said, to be spent transcribing old handwritten story notes). Then by the end of July, I’ll begin a front-to-back read-through of my rough draft, making edit notes as I go. As mentioned above, there are already a lot of edit notes littered throughout the document, so I’ll also be reading those as I go to make sure they still make sense. I’m still not sure whether I’ll print it all out and make handwritten notes (probably?) or just read through on the screen. Either way, the goal here is to get a complete picture of the novel as a whole, to better understand it.
I honestly don’t know how long a complete read-through will take. Maybe a month-and-a-half? That puts me in September before I actually put fingers-to-keyboard and actively start editing and changing things around.
With no prior experience doing edits and rewrites of a project of this size and scope, I have no basis for guesstimating how long it will take to edit this beast. I’ve done a handful of short stories (borderline novellas in a couple cases) and those have generally taken maybe half as long for each edit pass as the initial rough draft took to complete. Give it 4 to 7 edit passes… well… I could literally be doing edits and rewrites on this novel for many years to come. I’m optimistic that I’ll be faster, better, and have more free time to write in the months and years ahead than I have or was in the past. But I’m under no illusions about what I’m in for.
That said, for 2024 I’m not spending any time thinking about trying to find alpha or beta readers. Frankly, the rough draft as it stands is in no shape to share with outside parties. There are too many known problems already. Heck, I don’t even have proper chapter breaks yet. To say nothing of the plot holes and inconsistencies. My primary goal with this first edit pass is to get the plot and characterization in good enough shape that I can share the product with beta readers. If I’m fortunate enough to finish the first edit pass sometime in 2025, that’s when I’ll start the difficult process of looking for willing souls who would take on the almost thankless task of reading an early draft and providing feedback and commentary. Given the length of this behemoth, I don’t expect that will be an easy ask. Still, that’s a problem for future Stephen to solve. Present Stephen first needs to finish this rough draft and complete the initial read-through!
And that’s what I look forward to in 2024. Do you have any writing plans for the year, and if so how are they going?
The Undiscovered Author 