Weekly Dispatch: Building Momentum
Getting new words on the page, no matter what. ✨Plus✨ a smidge of craft talk on fixing a boring scene.
- Weekly Wordcount: 482
- Writing Streak: 15 days
This week was about getting new words onto the page every day no matter what. I'm still rusty enough that I'm not trying to hit a daily wordcount goal—the goal is to write something, every single day.
While wordcount goals can be a useful tool, they can also backfire when your creative fuel tanks are low on that magic combo of motivation and momentum. There was one day this week where I wrote exactly three words. That would have been demoralizing if I had a 300-word goal hanging over my head!
Right now, I'm all about trying to be gentle with myself on the days when three words is all I can muster and my motivation to write "Irredeemable" seems to wax and wane in some inscrutably erratic orbit. The idea is to keep chipping away at this draft bit by bit, keep building momentum so I can get back to cranking out 200-, 300-, 400-word days. What can I say, I've always been a slow writer. But I'd like to finish this particular story before the heat death of the universe.
A Smidge of Craft Talk: Fixing a Boring Scene
Most of my writing this week involved a scene that occurs immediately after a bunch of action happens in the narrative. While it's good to give readers some calm after a storm, such scenes have a heightened risk of being boring compared to all the excitement that came before. And no matter what you're trying to achieve with a story, one thing you cannot do is make your readers feel bored.
There I was, plunking words down restlessly, aimlessly, because I myself was feeling boredom about this scene while I was writing it. Boredom is a strong signal for a writer—if you're bored with your writing, your readers are going to know. The text might be grammatically correct but the vibes will be off. So at the first whiff of trouble, stop and assess the situation.
In the scene I was working on, Kassandra is chilling in a cold stream after having been in a fight earlier in the day. She's literally sitting and doing nothing. Boooooor-ing!