Preston Smith
Welcome back to our blogs here at Fuzzable! Today, I will be briefly discussing my writing journey regarding the novel I am currently working on!
In my free time, I enjoy writing a wide variety of articles here on Fuzzable. I love this website with all of my heart, after all. But I also like to explore my creative side. I started writing in middle school, I believe, with random fan-fiction pieces. I naturally moved on to short stories and journalism-type pieces. Finally, in college I began writing poetry, especially during my current senior year.
Now, on top of writing for Fuzzable and drafting poems, I am writing a novel. I first conceptualized the novel four years ago in my senior year of high school, so it’s been lingering and evolving in my mind for a long time. Spontaneously a couple of months ago, I decided to set myself a goal: I would have a complete first draft of the novel written by May 1, 2019. This was giving myself about three or four months to write a complete first draft, which isn’t a lot of time. Honestly, at the time, I was banking on my years of outlining the novel to get a first draft out quickly.
And so I set to work! Surprisingly, it has been going according to plan. I started with about 20,000 words from random times I started the novel in the years between senior year of high school and now. But as of the time of writing this blog, my novel sits at almost 66,000 words and 241 pages on Microsoft Word.
I could not have done this so far without having been outlining this novel premise for so long. This story has seen long nights, early mornings, days (even nearly a week) of not touching it because of being busy, and everything in-between, but it’s forming slowly but surely. And it’s beautiful to see happening.
I find that having a writing playlist exponentially helps (maybe that will become a different article down the line). Music keeps me motivated and energetic, which leads to better productivity. I’ve also been consistently editing and revising as I go, which has helped create cohesion throughout the story.
I still have a while to go before May 1, so who knows how long or short this novel will be or if I even meet my goal, but I am going to try my best. I have been having the time of my life creating the characters in this novel, and I find that talking about it in this format holds me accountable. If I don’t finish it, I’ll have to openly admit it – and I don’t want to do that.
Where are you at in your writing journey? Comment below and tweet us @Fuzzable because we’d love to connect with everyone!
