Tackling a Novel in Little Bites
I'm not ashamed to admit I'm (exceptionally) slightly chicken . I've been talking about starting a middle grade project since the summer , but I only recently got plucky enough to begin. That sounds braver than the reality - actually my local critique group set a dare goal to bring a novel project this month, so I had no choice. So here I am, four weeks into this bad boy, and I'm ready to talk about the "picture books are harder to write than novels" soundbite. A picture book is 500 words. But you change about 492 of those words eight times each before you have a final manuscript. So let's call that writing about 4,000 words to get 500 good ones. When I write a few hundred words of a novel, probably 90% of that writing is good. But I have to do that, oh, 100 times. That's like writing 100 (really crappy in desperate need of editing) picture books! I think it goes without saying I'm scared to Poopytown wi...