{"id":4334,"date":"2015-12-07T10:51:32","date_gmt":"2015-12-07T15:51:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=4334"},"modified":"2015-12-07T10:56:37","modified_gmt":"2015-12-07T15:56:37","slug":"when-page-totals-go-backward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/writing\/when-page-totals-go-backward\/","title":{"rendered":"When Page Totals Go Backward"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Not<\/a>

Not every step goes forward. (Deep, I know.)<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s nice to see pages adding up, especially in a first draft. A writer can\u2019t resist doing a little math and thinking, \u201cIf I can just write 5 pages today and every day this week, I\u2019ll have 25 by Friday. I\u2019ll have 50 by the Friday after that. I\u2019ll have an entire draft before I know it!\u201d<\/p>\n

It sounds SO appealing, but the problem is, writing doesn\u2019t often obey math, and expecting words to appear in tidy chunks can make a girl feel like she\u2019s failed when the pages don\u2019t appear on schedule. For me, going backwards and actually deleting pages seems to prove I\u2019m not a writer at all.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not the case.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m here to argue that sometimes going backward is exactly the right thing to. Sure, I need to get a complete draft before I can head into deep revisions. That is definitely the goal. But when I try to go forward and I end up in action for the sake of activity or a conversation that simply spins on air, sometimes stepping back gives me the clarity to see I\u2019m heading in the wrong direction. At times, a draft becomes stalled and ornery because it\u2019s becoming the wrong book. It\u2019s trying to tell you something.<\/p>\n

This deep balkiness is different from regular-grade, horribly hard writing. \u00a0Of course, writing a first draft depends on understanding that a lot of lousy, fruitless ideas are going to emerge along the way. We have to have a high tolerance for bad ideas at this point. It\u2019s right to invite them in and pat them on the head for now. Yet, if the book is truly, seriously going off track, and we find it no longer has any conflict or direction, it\u2019s okay to admit it. It\u2019s okay to stop and ignore the internal taskmaster who is demanding a page quota. It\u2019s fine to take the cursor, go back fifteen pages, turn them all blue, and delete them. Probably we\u2019ll drop them in the CUTS file rather than permanently delete them, but they won\u2019t be there cluttering up our first draft, masquerading as progress when they were a wrong direction.<\/p>\n

Let us not chastise ourselves for these deletions. Page-wise, it looks backward, but this is what real progress looks like.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s nice to see pages adding up, especially in a first draft. A writer can\u2019t resist doing a little math and thinking, \u201cIf I can just write 5 pages today and every day this week, I\u2019ll have 25 by Friday. I\u2019ll have 50 by the Friday after that. I\u2019ll have an entire draft before I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4335,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-4334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-writing","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4334"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4339,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4334\/revisions\/4339"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}