**The keys of the typewriter clack every time I press on them, creating a harmony in the quiet of the cottage. I type quickly yet carefully, determined not to have any errors, for I am writing the manuscript of a novel I dreamed up last night. I pull the page free and stack it on the others, watching it get higher with every page I finish. I work late into the night and early in the morning, determined to create a story I can be proud of.**

I know I only talk about reading on this blog, but one of my other hobbies is writing. I have loved to write for a long time now, enjoying the feeling of coming up with a story and trying to figure out what will happen and where it will go. So to motivate myself to work on my own writing project, I decided to challenge myself to try and write for an hour every day this week. I am very inconsistent when it comes to working on my project, which has been in the works for several years now (which is where the inconsistency comes in at), but I am determined to finish my rewrite by the end of the year.

As a bit of background, I’ve been working on a YA fantasy book for the past four years. I started back in 2022 and wrote my first draft until 2024. After that I started editing and a week ago decided to get more serious about it and rewrite it because I had a lot of plot holes and things that I just didn’t like.

I started on Monday and worked for an hour. I had a TON of motivation to sit down and write because I was brimming with new ideas and found my passion for the story once again. Tuesday was very much the same. Some of the story is being rewritten while keeping the same timeline of events, and other parts I copy and pasted over from my previous draft, A.K.A. draft 3. However, Wednesday I fell off the wagon a bit and didn’t write anything. I think I was rethinking some of my changes which change a large part of the story and I was a bit stuck. I debated making up this time, but wrote very late for my hour on both Thursday and Friday so I didn’t get to it. Those last few days were more difficult as I started realizing I didn’t know how much to copy over and how much to rewrite.

So how did this experiment go? Well, I think it’s a good practice to learn how to be more consistent. However, it was also hard to force myself to sit and write when I didn’t really feel like it. I think I work better in those spurts of inspiration and motivation, although the problem is how few and far between those moments are, especially considering how long I have been working on this story and that it is already firmly established in my mind which makes it hard to make changes. I think going forward, seeing as how I would like to finish this draft by the end of the year, I would want to make a goal of writing every day, with no word count goal or time limit. I think the thing that would motivate me more is to just sit with the book on my own terms so I don’t have to think about how much time is left and how much I have written. I also think I want to go back and read it through and fix anything I don’t like now. Starting this, I think the writing was a huge improvement from the last draft, but I think it got a little lost after the second chapter (there’s only about 30 pages so far in this rewrite so not a big deal) because I’ve been focused on following the last draft instead of letting it flow naturally.

So going into tomorrow, I want to try and sit with my book each week day and see what happens. Hopefully, we’ll actually get somewhere.

xoxo,

Just another reader