Depending on how you define “work in progress,” I currently have anywhere between 14 and 34 of them. And I expect to finish every last one in due time.
Just how I’ll manage this at first seems a mystery of faith, but looking back, I’ve had twenty pots on the broiler for as long as I can remember. It’s not always the same buffet being cooked—I finish one piece and start on the next. For a while I had a rule that I could only count as many WIPs as I had “live” submissions pending with markets. After too many rejections that I didn’t bounce out again, when my Duotrope page showed 14 submissions and I was trying to write 15 stories…either I needed to write a new cover letter or I needed to finish something. For a while, this was very effective, but then I began to write novels, which take much longer to sell and cannot be finished on the spot.
If you write another 2500 word scene you have a novelette, and depending on your genre, an ebook.
Now Zahara, the writer I intern with, recently remarked that longer stories get progressively more difficult in an almost logarithmic pattern–it’s harder to write one 75,000 word novel than it is to write ten 7,500 word short stories. It’s true: in a novel, each 2500 word scene is going to have to connect to and build on the preceding 2500 word blocs and lay a foundation for future ones. But each time it’s still a matter of getting 2500 serviceable words down on the page. And you can do that.
If 2500 words is completely pushing it, try 1000 words. Try 500 words. Five 500 word scenes make a 2500 words. They’re all building blocks of each other. And if you sit at the keyboard or with your journal and sweat, weep, and bleed for hours, and at the end of it you have a thousand words–congratulations! Assuming your novel is anything less than monumental (seriously. 100,000 words is about the limit for a debut novel, and even then only when the story involves a lot of worldbuilding and textural detail), 1000 words is a whole percentage point or more of it completed. That’s measurable progress. Write on!
The advice in this blog post, plus much more–including several other solutions for writer’s block, revision advice, and methods for submitting and marketing your finished stories–can now be found in The Starter Guide for Professional Writers. It’s a 97,000 word compendium of my best information on publishing from the new writer’s-eye view. I wrote it over the course of about nine months, 2500 words or so at a time.
About Therese
Therese Arkenberg's first short story was accepted for publication on January 2, 2008, and her second acceptance came a few hours later. Since then they haven't always been in such a rush, yet her work appears in places like Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Analog, Daily Science Fiction, and the anthology Sword & Sorceress XXIV. Aqua Vitae, her science fiction novella, was released by WolfSinger Publications in December 2011.
She works as a freelance editor and writer in Wisconsin, where she returned after a brief but unforgettable time in Washington, D.C. When she isn't reading, writing, or editing (it's true!) she serves on the board of the Plowshare Center of Waukesha, which works for social, economic, and environmental justice.