It came down to being a numbers game.
One of my karaoke friends had me thinking about how many pages I had written for Dark Water, my crime novel. When I started writing the story, I was quite enthusiastic about it, averaging about 20 or so pages per week.
When I hit the 100-page milestone, I was quite excited.
But every time I met up with my karaoke group, one of my friends would ask the same question: "How many pages have you written?" And over time, that question started putting some unintended pressure on me.
When I set out to write my first-ever murder mystery, I gave the page count a thought. The book wasn't going to be as long as Songsaengnim: A Korea Diary, which is 440 pages. Dark Water, I thought, might be about 250 pages.
Through my writing process, I would go backwards many times as I discovered new clues and as characters changed. I had already outlined the whole story before I even wrote the first chapter, so the structure was there: I just needed to fill in details.Side note: writing this novel was a lot of fun.
But after I hit 120 pages, I seemed to slow down a lot. I focused more on the legal procedures and researching what was realistic and plausible than the actual unfolding of the story.
It was all necessary but I was producing fewer pages.
The last time I saw my karaoke friends, I was asked about my page count, and I said that I was about 165 pages in. My friend then said, "Isn't that where you were the last time we saw each other?"
I don't think he meant to be hurtful with his comment but it did sting a bit. Yes, I wasn't writing as many pages at my initial pace, but I was making progress.
Last weekend, when DW and I were talking about Dark Water and she had asked me if I had Googled the title to see if there was a similar book out there, she also asked me if I had ever done a word count, rather than a page count.
She had an excellent point. Most publishers are more interested in the word count than the page count: depending on how the book is formatted, pages can differ. And I had been writing my book in Google Docs, which is formatted for an 8.5-inch by 11-inch page, which is bigger than a paperback page.
This week, as I was at about page 175 of Google Docs pages, I felt that I was coming to the climax of the novel, where the killer is revealed. But 175 was short of my 250-page goal. So I decided to do as DW suggested and perform a word count.
The 175 pages that I had written contained 74,416 words.
I did some online digging, and a typical crime novel ranges from 50,000 to 90,000 words. I was in the sweet spot, with a few more pages to go.
Another inquiry taught me that with my word count, I had written anywhere from 270 to 300 pages in an average paperback book. That information got me very excited.
The next day, I was writing full speed on the conclusion of Dark Water. And yesterday, I finished it. Or, rather, the first draft.
The final count is 79,600 words over 184 standard pages, or about 290 to 320 paperback pages.
In under five months, I have written my first crime novel. It took much less time than that, actually, with our family trip to Peru, a few weeks of editing photos and putting together videos for YouTube, and general distractions that kept me from writing. It would be fair to say it took less than four months to write this book.
I'm done but I'm not done-done.
The next step is to read and revise. But because I had done several revisions over the past couple of months, I don't think I'll have a lot to do before I feel the book is ready to send to an editor.
Wish me luck.