A symbolic milestone for me this week: passing 70,000 words in my draft. I’ve been writing more in the last two months because I have given myself permission to write for longer than an hour each day (which was my general rule). I discovered that I need at least 90 minutes to write something substantial. I suppose that I require some time to put my mind into the playground of words.

I am working on the second half of the novel now and it is the least defined. In the first half, I set up conflicts and collisions into which I’ve tossed my characters. I do not know how the characters are going to get through this and come to the end that I have in mind. I know that I’ll have to learn a lot more about the main characters and that I don’t know much about the secondary characters that I’ve only sketched in so far. The best way for me to understand characters is to write them in scene; that’s where I find out what they care about and how they will react to their circumstances.

I have been trying to edit less as I write, too. I find that my inner editor is strong and wants to linger over word choices and sentences in the midst of generating new text. How to balance getting the words down and making them shine?