I was listening to an episode of 6-Figure Authors today about how to plan and write a novel in a month. Right. I’m almost at the 7-month point with this story, and in fact it is over 8+ months since I started, if I include all of those days that I didn’t work on it.
I can only defend myself by saying that these are all pro authors who have been at it at a while and are doing this full time. But on the other hand, they all got to that point relatively early in their careers, it seems, particularly Joe with doing it during NaNoWriMo to start one of his series.
I can’t let this make me feel bad, though. It’s something I will be able to do in the future, I hope. But for now, I need to get experience finishing a novel so that I better know what works and what doesn’t. I can only improve my process from there.
But if I didn’t suffer from such a huge lack of confidence and worry constantly, I could probably get to that point a lot faster.
They all talked about their outlining process, including worldbuilding and character creation, taking about a day to maybe a week for a full series. Yeah, I’m way over that mark. But I did get two more scenes planned out today, so that is something. This is still the part of the book that I have relatively clear in my head – it’s close to where I was writing in my first false-start. But as I get later into the story, I think this process is going to become even more valuable as I really don’t know those scenes as well.