Month 2 update on The Fifteen Minute Novel Experiment

As this is the end of February, or at least the last weekday in February, I thought it a good idea to give a quick update on the progress of The Fifteen Minute Novel experiment. I started this experiment on January 1st, 2021 and the plan is to write fifteen minutes each day on the same story. Each day I start with the sentence that I ended with the day before. Then I write for fifteen minutes. Along side the text I am writing, I am keeping running notes. In the notes I mark down areas I need to research, sections I need to expand and things that occur to me as I’m writing that I will need to bring up later. I also have been adding in things that I need to go back in and add to the text during editing.

For the duration of this experiment (i.e. 2021) I am not editing the text. I run a quick spell check on the day’s section before I post it, but that is about it. I don’t do more, mostly because once i start tweaking things, there is the possibility I will slide into editing and expanding sections beyond their fifteen minutes. My goal is just write on those fifteen mutes so any editing (and boy will there be a lot of editing) will need to come later.

Thus far at the end of two solid months of Fifteen minute chunks of writing my word count has reached a total of 24, 632 words.

There are some things I have noticed in this writing. The first thing I’ve noticed is that I tend to skim over descriptions. I tend to spend little time on the actual descriptions in favor of getting as much of the story as I can see down in the fifteen minutes allotted to me to write. In my notes section I tend to add in more descriptive elements that will need to be feathered in later.

I also tend to shorten a lot of conversations to the basics so that I can get the broad strokes down before I move on. Those too will need to be expanded and edited once I get to that stage.

I have not gone back through the previous sections because the urge to edit is very strong, but I suspect that there will be a lot of trimming needed to eliminate some repetitiveness that occurred while I was trying to come to grips with the story. I wasn’t entirely certain of the direction it would take initially, so there was some fumbling about.I started without a solid idea of where I was going and that is the cost.Thus far though I am really liking James and am enjoying seeing where his life is going to go. I am happy with where two months of fifteen minute segments has taken me and I look forward to seeing what March will bring. I hope you are enjoying seeing the story develop as much as I am.