The problem with working quickly is that sometimes you get 85,000 words into a project before the second thoughts kick in. I knew from the beginning that the novel I started back in September was either the most marketable thing I’d ever written or a potential disaster. But I was having fun and clearly got a little carried away, writing nearly every day that the kids were at school — sometimes several thousand words per day. From late September through early February I wrote the bulk of the book, with just a handful of chapters remaining to tie some middle sections together. It was rough, dumped straight out of my brain to be harshly edited later, but it was going well.
Then the kids had a week off school and when I got back to writing I realized my momentum was gone. I’d already written the end of the book, which was probably a mistake — it’s hard to go back once the story feels like it’s been told. I stepped back and finally considered what I’d made, and the more I thought about it, the more I leaned toward “potential disaster.”
Luckily, around the same time I started talking with a friend about a children’s book he was working on and I felt inspired to return to a middle grade mystery I’d set aside a couple years ago. I jumped back in and six weeks later my first draft was done. Now it’s in the hands of test readers and I’m diving back into another abandoned project (an alternate history YA novel) for Camp NaNoWriMo — and hoping to use that autopilot speed-writing for something less disastrous!
michelle heimburger 