Onward

Tags

enchantment, revision, writing, writing process

Realized this weekend that I could outline and fill out plotting worksheets forever, but I think I’ve gotten as much good as I can from that approach by now. It’s time for me to plunge back into writing again. At this point I think I’m only going to have a handful of hours free for writing for the foreseeable future (maybe 10 or so in a good week, less in a bad one). But a handful is better than none, and I want to make use of what time I’ve got.

So I’m about to start this rewrite. Scared as anything, but I have a gorgeous iris blooming on my desk, and the sun is shining, and it’s time to begin.

I’ll start with a fresh file, though I’m not above importing text as and when I need it, to save my hands. (If the hands weren’t an issue, I’d just re-type, but they are, and that’s that.)

And as I go, I’ll keep these wonderful words from Antonio Machado close at hand, as I always do when I need courage:

Traveler, there is no path.
The path is made by walking.

Staying power

Tags

enchantment, writing process

I’ve finished the first draft of my WIP!

It came in at a whopping 85,000 words. Whew. (And that’s only the words I saved. I’ve probably got 50000 more in files that didn’t make the cut and were discarded. But I don’t want to think about that.)

Had the shocking realization yesterday that it’s been five years since I last finished a first draft of a book-length manuscript. I know there were good reasons for that (not least the revisions to that last book and its publication), but I feel like the world’s slowest snail. Five whole years. Gulp.

Looking on the bright side, I’ve learned a lot in those five years and that should stand me in good stead when I revise. At any rate, let’s hope it does, because it’s going to take a lot of work to turn this puppy into something publishable.

But the story has passed the first test: Staying power. Some ideas go bad on you after the briefest of flirtations; others keel over after a few months of dalliance. But even after spending months and months holed up with this one, it’s still alive for me. I wake up thinking about the characters, and when I go for walks I learn new things about them and their world. And that’s good, because if you love a story that much, it’s easier to keep working and working on it until it blossoms into what you want it to be.

Kerfuffle and perfection

Tags

enchantment, first drafts, jonowrimo, writing process

I had a good writing week — a surprise to me, since there was lots of life kerfuffle and I figured it would get in the way. But though it slowed me, it didn’t stop me, and at week’s end I’m over 3,500 words to the good.

(At least I hope it’s to the good. It’s so hard to know when you’re writing a first draft. But I’ve learned it’s best not to get too caught up with making judgements in that first go-round, or else you’ll spend a year rewriting the first lines ten billion times and never get anywhere else. At any rate, you will if you’re built like me. Which is not to say I don’t revise — plenty — during a first draft. I just try to keep it in check.)

I’m now very near the book’s climax, and I’m amazed by that, and grateful, because there was a time when it wasn’t clear whether I would ever be able to finish this book — or any other. But while I’m excited to be at this point, I’m also a bit fearful, too: The climax is where all the threads of plot and emotion should come together in a believable way, knotting in almost impossible tension and then resolving. It tests the mettle of every writer, and I can’t help worrying if I will be found wanting.

Which of course I will. That’s how first drafts work (and second and third drafts, like as not…). For a perfectionist like me, this is one of the hardest lessons of writing: That a work in progress is always a messy thing. Even the “finished” work is bound to fall short in a hundred ways from the vision I have in my head. It won’t have the full beauty and balance my head is looking for; like a garden gone wild, it has a mind of its own.

But that is also what makes me a writer: The wildness of writing draws me in, the mystery of events and emotions spilling onto the page. A messy process, yes, but it helps keep the impulse for perfection from deadening my life. It helps keep me alive.