Things to do at 100,000 words…
There are, for me, two big milestones in writing a book.
The first, is 10,000 words – maybe 45 pages or so of your pristine paperback. Let’s not beat about the bush, the first 10,000 words of anything are usually pretty rubbish. They’re the words which you use to explain that this is where we’re at, when we’re at, who we’re interested in and why they’re about to get involved in [insert exploit here]. Exposition is both necessary and tricky – if anyone here is interested in exposition in action, I suggest you go back and watch the Lord of the Rings films, where you will be surprised to discover that Gandalf is actually a walking bit of exposition in a pointy hat. I mean, credit to Ian McKellen that he managed to make Gandalf cool at the same time, because a good 80% of what he has to say relates to telling us what’s going to happen next and why, and no one has fun doing that. As any reader of my work will probably have noticed by now, I tend to try and get through this problem by throwing both my characters and the reader into the action as quickly as possible, so that neither of us are waiting around for stuff to happen, and that when exposition is delivered, it’s at least delivered running, often literally. (A similar principal can also be applied to lighting, and anyone who ever has to deal with me as a lighting designer is likely to find a giant sticker pasted to my desk proclaiming ‘less is more’, as sound a creative truth as was ever really uttered.)
Once the first 10,000 words are out of the way, things tend to pick up for me, and by 70 or 80,000 words (about 300 pages) things should be nicely complicated, and the use of many postit notes stuck to my bedroom wall usually offer the only way out. The next marker of significance, then, falls around 100,000 words.
There’s no real good narrative reason for this. Usually by 100,000 words things have just about got as bad as they possibly can get in any narrative and everyone really wants things to be cleaned up soon, please, not least my characters, who never get an easy ride of things and damnit, why should they? I guess it’s just one of those big numbers, one of those points where I can sit back and go ‘yeah, I have been working the last few months after all, eat that, Microsoft Word’. It’s also usually a point where my brain is starting to turn a bit mushy, and a number of things immediately start happening around the house that reflects this:
Massive amounts of laundry get done. Not just laundry, but the annual assessment of whether there’s a better way to dry my laundry after (there isn’t) because really, the system I’ve got at the moment is rubbish. All the odd socks in the sock drawer get sorted; my size-8 shoes that I out-grew five years ago are taken to the recycling point; the oven gets cleaned; I worry about my potted plants (if anyone knows a cure for extensive water-logging, please share); prescriptions are renewed for the preventer part of the asthma inhalers; language CDs are borrowed from the local library and the wonders of my various encyclopedias rediscovered, and the pages of the local cinema are looked over in the naive hope of something wonderful just waiting to be seen. Jobs are applied for, the tool pouch is cleaned out of old bits of LX tape, music is tidied, pictures are sorted, and if I’m feeling especially knackered, the computer gets its six-monthly full virus scan and hard drive defragmentation, just in case that’ll improve the quality of text.
You may also find, that my blog gets updated!
Deduce from that, dear reader, what you will….
