Category: Project Updates

The Starting Line

Ready or not, the day has come – there are only 200 days left to achieve my goal of completing a 100,000 word novel by the February 25th, 2019.

Today is important because it marks an unofficial start date. If I’m to reach my goal, I need to start writing 500 words a day, every day, until I reach the finish line. Writing more will soften this deadline somewhat, but the race has definitely started, and it seems as good a time as any to review my progress thus far.

First, the good. I’ve finished The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and while reading Campbell was often an exasperating experience,  I have a grasp on the hero’s journey that was sorely lacking in my projects of years gone by. My grip on the subject grew firmer still by contrasting Campbell’s work with Christopher Vogler’s. The theoretical parts of my project, at least, seem under control.

I’ve analyzed the first Star Wars film, as well as Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone and much of The Hobbit. I learned a great deal from these masterworks, and the pages of notes I took on each wait restlessly for the day they’ll be turned into blog posts.

Outside of the blog, I’ve built a durable storyboard of the novel I’ll be writing. There are still a few unresolved questions and plot points to hammer out, but I have more than enough to start.

Now for the bad. As mentioned, while I have reviewed several of the great Hero’s Journey stories, I have not yet taken the time to smelt my raw material into content for the blog. This is not just a problem as a content creator  – the process of writing an essay helps solidify knowledge and expose gaps in understanding, so I want to complete these analyses before getting too far into my project.

An even greater problem is the shamefully small amount of time I’ve spent applying the practice techniques detailed at the start of the blog. This may turn out to be a boon, since in the meantime I’ve discovered several writers of literary fiction whose mastery of English is vastly superior to some of the authors I considered studying, but I’m still perilously behind where I wanted to be. I can only hope that any improvements in writing technique achieved during the final months of the project can be applied through edits.

Finally, my recent trip to Nigeria was both enriching and enlightening, but I didn’t get any work done. I hope to at least slightly make up for this lapse by releasing the Hero’s Journey toolbox as soon as possible. It’s been coming together quickly since my return, so with any luck it will be ready in the next couple weeks.

And that brings us to the heart of my next challenge. I’ve written three (unpublishable) novels of 100,000 words or more at the slow-but-steady rate of 500 words a day, but never while trying to simultaneously maintain a blog. “Does that mean,” you may ask, “that your already languid rate of posting will decrease even further?” Not if I have anything to say about it. The challenge of doing it is the point of doing it, and so, to appropriate a line, “Damn the distractions, full speed ahead!”

The Staring Line: Here we go!

Now that I’ve laid out the theory of deliberate practice, it’s time to make some concrete plans. To get started, I need to decide two things:

  1. What are the specific goals I’m aiming for?
  2. Who are the expert performers that I’m going to study?

In general, I enjoy science fiction, fantasy, and horror in that order. Because of this I’m going to focus on authors from those genres, but genre isn’t a specific enough goal for deliberate practice. Altered Carbon and The Martian are two of my favorite recent books and both are science fiction, but they have about as much in common as airplanes and helicopters.

So instead of focusing on genre, I’m going to work on a type of story. Given that this is my first attempt to learn a story type, I figure I’ll start with something ubiquitous, that everyone knows and almost everyone uses. With that in mind, the type of story I’ve decided to work on first is the original, the classic, the story-that-began-all-stories, the Hero’s Journey.

With that decision, a number of questions are immediately answered. Which authors have written the best hero’s journeys? Two names leap to mind: J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien. If I expand the question to film, George Lucas and the Wachowski brothers join the team. There’s also an academic and psychological breakdown of the story type in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I’ll use these five resources as my starting point and expand from there.

But this plan still isn’t solid enough. Remember: “Deliberate practice focuses on specific goals and develops lesson plans to reach them bit by bit.” So how about this: first, I’m going to focus on mastering the structure of the story. I’ll analyze my four primary sources and Joseph Campbell’s work, then use what I learned to lay out the general path of the hero’s journey.

Then, after I’ve gotten a good handle on the key story events, I’ll pick the best example of each event from my pool of primary sources. Once I’ve chosen my exemplars I’ll use Benjamin Franklin’s hints exercise to examine how the author handled the scene and simultaneously study their writing style. I’ll repeat as needed with examples from the each author’s work until I feel confident enough to try applying what I’ve learned in an original novel.

And that’s the endgame. Within the next 12 months, I’ll write an original hero’s journey story of at least 100,000 words.

The average novel has between 80,000 and 140,000 words, so I think 100,000 is an appropriate target. In the past my goal was to write 500 words a day, a number I deliberately kept low to ensure I wouldn’t get overwhelmed. I found it’s much easier to aim for a low target and routinely surpass it than to set a high goal I couldn’t consistently reach.

500 words a day gets me to 100,000 words in a bit more than seven months. If I manage 1,000 words a day I’ll finish in slightly more than three months. That means I’ll have at least five and perhaps up to six or seven months for studying, after which I need to start hitting word count goals. I’ll also need to carve out time for writing posts on the Practice Write blog while maintaining a job and hopefully having some occasional free time for a life. I’ve found that editing can stretch on and on almost without end (especially if I deliberately take some time to cool off from a story) so I’m not going to include it in my 12 month goal.  

It’s a brisk pace, but it seems doable. So that’s the plan: by the 25th of February, 2019, I’ll have analyzed and studied at least (in reality, definitely more than) 4 hero’s journey stories, built a mental representation of how the story works, and written an original hero’s journey novel of at least 100,000 words.

Gauntlet thrown. Let’s get to it.