Just.

I set myself the goal of finishing my first, rough draft, by the end f the month and as long as I keep going on my current schedule, the rough draft will be done on the thirty first. Parts of the manuscript are pretty dire, some are outright unreadable but it will be finished, and from that I can chop out a decent first draft.

I’ll go into an explanation of rough draft, first draft and final draft next time.

That leaves the question of what to do next? I’m going to take Stephen King’s advice (in his excellent book “On Writing”) and leave in a drawer for a couple of weeks and do something else.

You heard me.

As a writer, you’re going to fail at your goals sometime. I’m not trying to be depressive about it, it’s just that sometimes life gets in the way. If you catch fire I would expect you to put it out before getting on with chapter three.

It could happen.

The point of all of this is not that I failed to write 20,000 words, or even that I cooked my brain like a Christmas turkey. It’s that I got out 8,000 words, which is significantly more than I normally write (I usually go for 3 to 4 thousand words over a weekend). If I hadn’t gone for the big score, I wouldn’t have gotten 8,000 words out as a kind of failure by-product.

So lesson one in failing right is: Dream Big.

 If you don’t set a big goal, you have no chance of achieving it. Even if you don’t hit that big goal straight off, if it’s big enough, there’s always the chance you’ll get something worthwhile out of it anyway.

Like 8,000 words.

Of course, if I’d set myself a goal that was too big, like finish my first draft by the end of the weekend, I wouldn’t have done anything at all. You need to dream big, but it needs to be theoretically possible to hit your goal. As much as I joke about setting myself the impossible goal of finishing a first draft by the end of the month, it’s more than possible.

That make lesson two: Think difficult, not impossible.

I blog about these thing sin the hope that other people can learn from my mistakes, but I try not to give myself too much grief about the mistakes themselves. Of course I’m disappointed if I don’t get a goal, but being angry at yourself is a waste of energy you could be putting into your writing.

If being angry helps you write; by all means go nuts, but as soon as your writing is done with, put the anger away too. I’ve really made myself suffer in the past by being overly hard on myself for making mistakes. This is your writing, your novel. A mistake is not a tragedy because tomorrow, you can do some more writing.

Lesson Three is the big one: Learn from your mistakes, and then LET IT GO.

I’m on track to finish my first draft by the end of the month, and in part that’s because I haven’t let my innate ability to fail get in my way. If you check on all of your favourite authors, they’ve screwed up more than once on their way to becoming great writers.

Failure is temporary; it can’t stop you unless you let it. Now get writing.

I got to the end of chapter 5, and I’ve hit my word count (just). Now the bigger mission begins, finish draft one before the end of July. I’ve been mapping out he rest of the novel, so I know more or less where I’m going. I’m not a natural out-liner and new character ideas are making themselves known in the back of my mind so my outline and the finished product may vary wildly.

I just wrote up a guest blog submission for Nathan Branford’s guest blog competition. It’s an extension of my post on getting an accountant and bringing some extra money in. Either way it will be up on the articles page by the end of the week.

Thought for the day: Twitter, amazingly time consuming but strangely fulfilling