Work Backwards

Sometimes the only way through is back

Hello friends,

I’ve been doing some goal setting (in February even! It’s not just for January anymore!) And I got a new planner, which I will tell you all about soon, and in said goal planning, I realized I needed to work backwards. I knew I wanted to finish something by the end of the year (an arbitrary deadline but one I wanted to hit anyway). Nice and tidy. I know where I am today, and I know where I want to be, but what do I do in the middle?

After having written four books (all trunked! and I lived!), I have a better idea of what I need to do. You might not be there yet, but I’ll get to how this can help you in a second. I know that I need to do two full edits before I let anyone see it, at LEAST. And I have about 25,000 words already done (though they are messy, hence the edits) and it should probably be about 70,000ish words for what I’m working on. (This is not more word count discourse.) I’m not overly concerned about the final word count. I’m sure it will be long enough, and it will be what it needs to be. (I rarely go too long.) And if I get to the end and it’s not the end, even if it’s December, well, I’ll just keep going. I’m not going to throw it in the trash.

So, working backwards, I want 6ish months to do two full edits of the book, so I need to be done writing by July. Working back from that, I need to write 14,000 words a month, or about 500 words a day. 500 words a day is totally doable! With a little wiggle room for the days I can’t get to it or need a break! The everyday-ness of this schedule doesn’t work for everyone, but when I actually get myself to do it, it works for me.

BUT FIRST, I have to know what I am freaking writing. I have those 25k words, and I’m pretty happy with where the story is going. But I don’t know the ending yet, and that is a problem for this story, as it’s a little more intricately plotted than my other projects. So I have to figure out what happens, and work backward from that. I cannot write 500 words a day if I don’t even know what’s going to happen in the book. I think I came up with something that will work, and I’m going to spend the next two weeks plotting everything out, and then hit the ground running in March.

(pssssst, let me tell you a secret. There’s a good chance none of this will work! There’s a good chance that my plot won’t work and I won’t write my 500 words a day and I won’t get two full edits in before the end of the year. THAT’S OK. I still have to get it done, because you can’t edit or sell a book you don’t write, but life is weird and hard and unpredictable and as long as I KEEP GOING then well, I’ll get there. And having a plan makes it a tiny bit easier.)

Stay safe, my friends,

XOXOXOX,
Kate