When someone asks me how I write my novel, I say “124 words at a time.”
Okay, if I’m being truthful that’s not quite right as nobody has yet asked me how I write my novels. When someone learns I write their first question is more typically “Have I read anything you’ve written?” and when I say “It depends how much horror fiction you’ve read” their response is usually to look around the room for an Accountant or an Estate Agent or a Hedge Fund Manager… anyone, really.
But let’s live in the land of make-believe just for a moment. If someone does ask me how I write my novel I will say “124 words at a time” and then they’ll look blankly at me and I shall explain:
It’s like this. A novel is a lot of words - the first draft of “The Lost” is likely to come in somewhere around 120,000 words. It was written in two “sessions” (separated by the edit of Bloodie Bones) and for each of those sessions I wrote about 8,000 words a week. Some weeks I wrote more (hurrah!) some weeks I wrote less (boo!) but over the piece it averages out somewhere near 8,000.
That isn’t a coincidence. When I write a novel I try and plan out my time to enable me to hit that target of 8,000 words a week. And each day I chip away at the 8,000 words so that hopefully by the Sunday night I know I’ve done my week’s work. It might be that without that target in mind I would still write 8,000, but I don’t think so. I think I would probably write 7,500, or maybe 6,000, maybe even 5,000. 8,000 words each week is a stretch and sometimes I’m not quite there - which is where my 124 words comes in (you’d thought I’d forgotten, didn’t you?).
Because I know what I’m aiming for that number is there in the back of my mind. Last week I was 124 words away from my target for the week. Not a lot, but after all my planned writing sessions I was still short, and I knew I was short. Those 124 words nagged at me until I was able to find a few minutes to write them (and, as it turned out, a few hundred more words as well). As soon as they were written I could relax.
Until the next week, and the next 8,000 words.
So that’s how I get to the end of a novel - 124 words at a time.
And just a quick plug reminder: in between these blog posts you can visit my website: www.richardfarrenbarber.co.uk for my erratic postings on the 10 novels that shaped me as a writer.
