Write With Me Day 5

Word count in this video: 93,138 to 93,717 (579 new words) Chapter 25 Total goal: 350,000 words The video includes a little jokey moment, some chair dancing, and some logistical talk. To get straight to the typing sounds, hop ahead to 2:45. The words were coming on slowly today, but I made it to a landing place for chapter 25, and that's the Act break in Lonesome Dove, so for now, it's an Act break for me too. From Chapter 26, I need to switch direction entirely, inventing a brand new narrative line. And there's a lot that I'll need to go back and revise during the editing process, of course. But not now. I am not going back and fixing the draft at all. I am allowing myself to, as the sign in my studio says, Elf it Out. Which is a quote from a video my partner sent me from a video by the writer Zach Cregger, wherein he talks about how you finish a first draft. His advice is to pretend you've hired a little elf to write it, and the elf is not a good writer; his job is just to get the story down in whatever form it comes in. As many coaches and books on writing have said, you don't do creation of the story and making the story hang together well in the same pass of work. So just getting the story out is my job, for now. Committed to elfing it out! Making it sound good, and make sense, is a Future Me problem. ABOUT THIS CHANNEL This writing channel is an art project. It is not going to be optimized for the algorithms in any way. So if you found it, welcome! I'm glad you're here. I'm writing a book based loosely on Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. I'm following McMurtry's narrative pace in order to understand how he built the book — the setting and characters and so forth are all my own. The channel is here to document my entire writing process, along with whatever else comes into my head to do here (probably some art and music, almost definitely some grammar and poetry videos). ABOUT ME If you want to read things I've written, you can find me on Substack with a cheeky Google search. Publication title: Play Theory. Thanks for watching!