Today was a great day! I reached an important milestone in my Write Club journey and completed the first draft of the first of 8 stories I will write during the 16 weeks. I realize it may not sound like an enormous achievement, but this is one of my longer stories.
For a little perspective, my typical stories for Steemit are about 750-1,500 words. That's 1-2 pages of writing. (For some examples, see the list of my Steemit short stories on my intro post.) The requirement for Write Club stories is 1,500 to 7,000, which means the range is from about 2 pages to about 14 pages. My first story is over 6,000 words - about 13 pages. But it's fun and readable, I think!
Image credit: Pixabay
What's next?
Well, when I say drafted, that means that the basic story is in place. It has a beginning, a middle, an end, and a storyline with hopefully interesting, complex characters. Now I'm letting it rest for a bit until tomorrow, when I will look at it with hopefully fresh eyes and begin the editing process. I expect that to take a good chunk of hours tomorrow (thank goodness it's the weekend), followed by a rest and another edit on Monday.
And then the peer editing cycle begins. The 8 of us will read each other's stories, and there's an editing process where everyone's story will be critiqued by at least a few other writers.
I know what you're thinking. Why does writing and editing a story take so long? Well, it depends on a number of factors, including the length and complexity of the story. And in my case, I have to work my writing around my full-time job and other commitments. But in general, if you have a fairly lengthy and complex story (which I do), and if you want it to be polished enough to submit to literary magazines at the end of it all (which I do), the process of writing, editing, and polishing a story can be very involved indeed!
Thanks for reading. If you want to know more about Write Club, click the #writeclub tag.
If you are a writer seeking community and support, you can find editors to help you at The Writers’ Block on Discord.
