Literal Blood, Sweat, and Tears

This book has taken literal blood, literal sweat, and literal tears from me. Seriously. I have this cut on the back of my leg I keep reopening on the chair I sit in, because it's leather and sticky and even when the cut doesn't reopen it gets really irritated. It's really hot in this basement (for other floridians -- yes, I do have the only basement in Florida) as well as humid and the AC doesn't work that well, so I sweat a lot and it never dries. Especially right now, because I'm wearing boots and jeans because there was a wasp down here earlier so I'm geared up for battle. I haven't heard it in awhile and don't know where it went, but I'm not taking chances just yet.

And, there's several scenes I have written where I've cried a lot writing them. Usually scenes with the protagonist and her family, or with her boyfriend (specifically where she breaks up with him). Blood, sweat, tears.

This brings up varying issues for me. Probably the most salient is the emotion of the book and whether it will come across well enough. Also prominent is how hard am I really pushing myself, and thus how self-congratulatory can I safely get? I guess we'll start with the emotion.

The book I'm writing is very emotional. It's a woman's life, and she has a lot of really shitty things happen in it. There are at least eight scenes where she cries, which makes me nervous because that seems like a lot especially when I'm only halfway done. These scenes are very emotional to me, obviously, but the characters all live in my head. I know everything that is going on in everyone's mind, and yet my writing style is pretty minimalist. I feel like less is more, you can say a lot with a little, etc, but I frequently find myself wondering just how much the reader is going to fill in. Is it enough to show a character putting a hand over their face and taking a deep breath, or do I need to go more into detail? Can I trust it to be obvious why they're about to cry? Is the simple writing going to hold a lot of power, or fall flat?

These are the questions I torture myself with, and that I can only really answer by showing the writing to people. So far it's only really been shown to a couple of friends who already like my writing and who report that the story draws them in pretty powerfully, but who are probably at least a little biased. What I need is a professional opinion, but I am not going to pay for that and I can't get it without paying for it until I've finished the manuscript. So there's really nothing to do but keep on plugging.

Which brings me neatly around to the other point. I've never gotten past 10,000 words on a story in my life. I've been writing prose (not always well...) since I was thirteen, although my dad would put it at since I was six, because I wrote a thing that was bound into a little book to be kept in the classroom. I do not know if they would have been as impressed if I told them that roughly half of my story was directly ripped off from a second grader's story (my first and second grade class was a mixed-age class with kids of both grades). I'm actually shocked they didn't notice at the time, given the similarities I remember. Maybe I was more creative about it than I gave myself credit for.

Anyway, I'm writing at a pace of around 3000-4500 words a day. Every day. This pace, as far as I can tell, is fucking insane. The usual good pace I hear is around 1000 words three or four days a week. And yet I still feel like I'm not pushing hard enough and guilt myself into writing just to the next thousand and the next and the next. While this is certainly a good way to get a manuscript written, I'm not so sure you can get a good manuscript written. I have this thing where if I'm not exhausted when I finish, I don't feel productive. I don't know where I got this from -- possibly the fact that most things people have to do on a regular basis, I'm not good at, and most things I'm not good at exhaust me.

I don't feel physically exhausted at the end of a night of writing. Tired and sleepy, sure, but that's different from exhaustion. Thus, I always think I didn't write enough. I'm not very good at gauging mental exhaustion so I don't really know if I'm mentally exhausted, but "yes" seems like the safe bet there. It can be draining to cry for half an hour because I keep having to stop to get coherent again before I can keep writing, continuing to work myself up into emotion. So even though I've written one twentieth of the entire book in one day, a book that most people would take a year to write, I feel inadequate and unproductive. And so I say "I write 4000 words today" and people say "that's amazing" and I go they're just trying to make me feel better because they think I'm still 6. So it's impossible for anyone to encourage me, and any kind of self-reward feels like a fraud.

I guess I don't really have an ending for this post either. Except that now I can hear buzzing and I don't know where it's coming from so I think the wasp is about to murder me.