When You’re Ready to Burn Your WIP

Don’t. Or, at least, have a Fire Marshal on hand.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash

Last night, I passed 35,000 words on this draft of my novel.

To be fair, if we’re counting everything that I’ve written on this project over the last year since I’ve started it, it’s probably closer to 200,000 words. But I think that somewhere along the way, I’ve just got to accept that I’m going to have a few false starts on drafts, while I get to know my characters. I’ve made peace with that.

But this is going to be the draft I finish. I can feel it in my bones. So 35,000 is the number that matters.

It’s far enough into the draft that I’ve got a significant amount of momentum building up, even if it doesn’t feel like I’m going somewhere. It’s like riding a train through Central California: you look outside the window, and all you can see is miles and miles of empty farmland going past. Stockton, Modesto, Turlock, Merced . . . miles and miles of the same old nothing.

(I’m going to stop here and apologize to one of my Twitter friends, Dr. Lynn Sosnoskie, a weed — not that kind of weed — scientist out of Merced. I know the weeds are important. They’re just not fun to watch from the train.)

But eventually you end up at the end of the line in Bakersfield — even if it feels like…