After roughly twenty days of writing, I’ve finished the first, and extremely rough, draft of my very first novel.

It only stands on about 30 000 words (which is about half of what I’m aiming at), but I haven’t included any descriptions or thoughts in my first draft. For now I’ve basically just written down the actual story, getting the plot down on paper. There are also a few key scenes that I just wrote down in a sentence or two, knowing that I’d only end up rewriting them once I got to that part of the novel.

It’s been very helpful to write the novel like this, because I spotted a couple of things the story needed, as well as rearranged a couple of scenes in order to strengthen the story. I’ve also deleted a few scenes. Thank goodness they were unpolished versions that didn’t take too much of my time.

One thing is for sure, this was the easy part. After a few days of researching the setting and time frame of my story, I’m ready to start expanding the story on a scene by scene basis tomorrow, right from the very first line.

This will clearly be a very long phase of the writing process, but I’m certain I’ve sorted out most, if not all, of the plot issues that might try to impede my process.

Next time I’ll blog a bit about the setting of my novel. So stick around.

All the best.