Halfway

In case you weren't aware, I'm writing a novel. Actually, you probably weren't aware because I've specifically not mentioned it on this blog until now. But yesterday, I hit an arbitrary milestone towards my arbitrary word count goal of 80,000 words, and it felt like time to announce: I made it to the halfway point.

Halfway. The term implies that something is in the process of becoming something else, but it's also a pause. On Dictionary.com the sample sentences for halfway are as follows: "He stopped halfway down the passage"; "She woke halfway through the night"; and "I'm incapable of doing anything even halfway decent." Besides the humor in these sentences (especially the last one), I find that the halfway point is a time for reflection. So I'm reflecting.

It's hard to know what to say about this book because for so long I've avoiding calling it what it is. I avoided saying that I was writing a novel (except to my family) because I didn't want it to fall into the ever growing category of "Projects Laura Says She's Working on But Never Finishes." Besides, the same goal has shown up on my new year's resolutions every year for probably the past ten years: "Write a book!" Always with so much enthusiasm. Always with so much hope.

I've never gotten as far with a project as I have with this one, and miraculously, it feels like I might actually finish it. But right, I'm supposed to be reflecting. I'm such a future-oriented person that I tend to see every accomplishment as a gateway to the next big thing. I need to stop doing that. I need to acknowledge all the work that went into making it happen.

So let's start from the beginning. This isn't like other things I've written, where I can pinpoint the exact moment the idea came to me. I do know when the seed of the idea appeared, though. It was the summer of 2014, and I was working at the Harris County Archives. The office was quiet, and white, and I was cataloguing the dates and contents of documents in a series of boxes, so I often listened to music and podcasts to fill up some of that quiet, empty space. I listened to two podcasts back to back: the "Wild Ones" episode of 99% Invisible and the Radiolab episode about the Galapagos Islands. I'd always had a passing interest in the Galapagos, but these two episodes filled me with curiosity. Who lives on the islands? What was it like in Darwin's time vs now? The islands loomed in my imagination: they felt untamed and magnetic and completely mysterious. I knew immediately that I had to write something set there.

I got as far as writing the first paragraph of a short story called "Mother and Daughter Go to the Sunny Galapagos," before in classic Laura fashion, I abandoned it. For a year. One day I re-opened the document, re-read the paragraph and let it grow into something larger. Something with more scope than a short story. Something that could, maybe, one day, be a novel.

I think there are a couple of factors that have made this project easier to write so far:

1. No re-reading. I hardly ever go back and re-read what I've written after writing it. That's not to say that I don't edit as I go - I can write and re-draft and tweak whatever I've written that day as much as I want. But as soon as 24-hours have passed, I don't look at what I wrote the day before unless it's just to remind myself where I am. If I did re-read whole passages with even that little bit of distance, I don't think I'd have the confidence to keep going, no matter how much I told myself "It's a first draft. It's supposed to be bad."

2. Loose structure. I think I've finally figured out an outlining technique that works for me. Basically I make a list of all the scenes I know I want to write, in somewhat chronological order. As I write, I move those scenes onto a list of existing scenes. That way I can see what I've written and what still needs to be written at a glance. I write in what is basically chronological order, but if I really get stuck, I let myself skip ahead to important scenes from my list that I really want to write.

3. Cutting myself slack. I want to finish this draft. I want to finish it so badly it hurts sometimes, because I know exactly how far I have to go, and how bad I am at writing every day. But I also know that I'm not the kind of writer who can just pound out 2,000 words a day and not care if they're bad. I like being happy with what I've written that day, even if it's only one sentence that I'm proud of. My goal is to write as quickly as I can without turning the experience into a chore. I even let myself "start over" when I thought – 25,000 words in – that the novel needed to be told from a different character's perspective. It took me 5,000 words of back-tracking to figure out that no, that wasn't the case.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm really proud of how far I've gotten. I still have another 40,000 words to go, but somehow they don't feel as daunting. Because I'm halfway. And I'm pausing. And that's a good feeling.