Karen Collum">Australian Children's Author

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Last week I lamented my inability to start my novel and gave myself the daunting task of JUST WRITE! I’m delighted to say, in spite of me still finding many reasons to procrastinate, it worked. And not only that, it was fun! And energising! And exciting! (And I’ve used too many exclamation marks already…)

Having planned my novel quite thoroughly (I’m a Type A personality – sadly, none of this fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants-and-see-what-wonderful-things-I-discover-along-the-way for me) I knew exactly where I wanted the story to start. I’m writing in first person for the very first time, so the POV choice wasn’t really a choice at all. And I knew that I would be writing the scene in the crucial seconds leading up to a major disturbance for my poor main character. When I found an hour to write while the kids napped, it still took me ten minutes to check Twitter and Facebook and my emails, before finally decided to JUST WRITE! And I did. I wrote a little over 1,000 words and it felt fantastic. I finished the scene at a point where I could easily pick it up and run with it the next time.

Then on Friday morning, my wonderful mum and husband took the three big kids to the movies for a treat. My mum offered to look after Miss H so I could go, but I told her I was secretly hoping to get some writing done while Miss H slept. She understood :)  It was strange having only one baby at home, but I used my time wisely and while listening to the beautiful silence of a sleeping baby, I wrote to the end of the first scene.

My NEO and me :)

One thing I haven’t mentioned is that I write my first drafts on a nifty little gadget called an Alphasmart NEO. It’s a dinosaur-like word processor that has no internet capabilities. It’s really just a modern, light-weight, durable typewriter that doesn’t allow you to do anything but JUST WRITE. I can only see four lines of text on the screen at any one time which means that I am forced to JUST WRITE and not go back and edit and change my mind a gazillion times as I’m writing. I’ve found it a great little tool to use as it keeps my inner critic well and truly locked up during that all-important first draft. After each writing session, I upload the text into Word and it becomes just a normal document.

So there you have it. My little pep talk to myself worked and my grand total word count for the week is: (drumroll please!) 2600 words! Ideally it would’ve been great if I’d hit the 5K mark, but at this point I’ll take anything I can get. I’ve got the first scene written, I know which scene I’m writing next and I’m going to try and carve out some writing space over the next day or two to get that sucker written. It really is as simple as JUST WRITE!

Happy writing :)