How I wrote a novel Phase 3 Gollum arrives. 300 hours (conservative estimate)

How I wrote a novel Phase 3 Gollum arrives. 300 hours (conservative estimate)

It all went crazy. I found my precious and hunched over it in a dripping cave whilst my hair fell out and my skin turned grey. Not quite but almost.

I began an obsessive affair with my keyboard.

I had my idea. I had my synopsis. I had a 3 act structure and a scene summary.
I wrote. And I wrote. Line by line, scene by scene.
I wrote without looking back.
Following the theory that I needed words on the page, and it didn't matter much what the words were as long as they took me to the end. And they did. I used Scriv http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php to help me keep some semblance of order. Around 300 hours later I had 82,000 words, no speech marks, little punctuation, no description.

In this 8 weeks I wasn't pleasant to live with. I was Gollum. I couldn't stop thinking about my people (characters). They spoke to me night and day. I emailed myself at work with conversations, I wrote in the middle of the night in the notebook beside my bed. I scribbled notes before saying good morning to my real life beloveds. I wasn't present in any conversations. I hardly went out. I came in from work and wrote. I sacrificed a lot of sleep. This is first draft fever. Everything stops for the story.

But when I held the first draft of my novel  I danced till dawn.

Then I rewrote the first seven chapters because I could see now that they were total excrement and couldn't bear to let them be in my beloved first draft.

This was the point I knew I would be a writer. I knew it. My novel wasn't flying yet, but I was.

Catch How I wrote a novel Phase 4 Getting to know you, next Friday.