Vanity blogging?

The point of documenting my Slog is not, honest, it really is not, just the public diary-keeping aspect. I’ve learnt how many such blogs are out there and they’re not the most inspiring read unless you’re already mad about the writer. The point of this is mainly to help motivate myself – which function it is fulfilling – and also for posterity, for the future time when i’m as big as Tolkein (or Doris Lessing would do) and the world will be tearing my work apart for A Level and degree essays: the (cliché alert) warts-n-all, blow-by-blow account of how even the great mmSeason once struggled and suffered for her creativity.

So in the spirit of that, i’m announcing that today i wrote 838 words, which is three pages in the Big Pink Book and a little less than most recent days, and brings the Total So Far to 57,650. The big sixty is in sight. Be happy for me.

Eight hundred and fourteen words written and typed up today

Yesterday i caught up with myself: typed up two days’ scribbles plus a bit left over that hadn’t been typed before the summer. I’ve set myself a new target of nine hundred words a morning – nine hundred, cos that is three pages of my Big Pink Book. This week – ok, i know Monday to now isn’t statistically significant, but i’m sure of myself at the moment – i’ve stuck to it. Lower than the plan i used to have in mind but it seems to be what i can realistically do.

This brings Chapter Eight to 4,300 words and the whole thing to 56,000 if i’ve added it up right.  :0)  Chapter Three is for now a sentence reminding me what’s going to happen in that bit; and about 9,300 words are doomed to be scrapped cos i changed history for T. I like to think that cancels out – though of course it is still ten (or eleven) -ish mornings’ extra.

Told you i’d get back into the swing. It feels VERY good to know what’s happening next, and something of why that’s happening – ie what it leads to – and to have a shapeless-but-substantial idea of what happens in the end.* Can’t say i’ve been in that situation ever before, with this story. (In the past i’ve set out to Write A Novel a few times, some of them with a very clearly laid-out plan, but i’m not counting those as they have faded out. One or two are not dead and may one day be resuscitated, but they can’t be included in the evidence for How I Work because on them, i didn’t work.)

* I’m also quite looking forward to where i’m about to take T and what we’re about to encounter there.

I still feel this is ‘nearly halfway’. It’s been feeling like ‘nearly halfway’ for a hell of a lot of weeks. Bit like that middle part of a long walk when you keep thinking your destination will come into view from the top of the next hill, and at the top of that hill you revise that to probably from the top of the next hill, and ‘next’ keeps adapting its meaning. Eventually of course you do reach the pub and sit down for a well-earned and very welcome ploughman’s.

If i had a definite total word count in mind, i’d have a better idea of how far along i am. At this very moment i’m thinking that to produce a finished piece of about 100,000 words, i’ll need a first draft of about 150,000. Don’t know if the proportion i cut from a work this length will be the one-third that it usually is from short fiction. This is why the Hopeful bit’s up there with the Travel title!

Anyway. Having got this lot into OpenOffice, i got distracted researching skinks and tabards. All relevant!

Rewrite or don’t rewrite?

I usually rework drastically whatever i write. Stories i reduce to 2/3 their first-draft wordage; poems i hack, bully and warp into a form completely different from what i started with. Words sidle to the other end of their line, morph into different words, and dematerialise; stanzas shift and swap places; line-breaks jiggle around like ping-pong balls on elastic. And in prose, paragraphs die, occasionally to be reborn but more often never to be seen again; scenes shrink to a single sentence (ooh, alliteration); characters change their clothes, looks, and names. Even twitfix take crafting.

So why is it that my first ‘officially’ published poems (in the third issue of ouroboros) are two that i hardly altered from the original moment they came to me?

What does this say about my writing?

Half a hundred thousand

It’s stop-start, but it’s not all stop.

Three hundred and twenty-five words this morning. Paltry, it’s true.

But i know what happens next.

🙂

Words so far: 49½ thousand. So close, ouch.

And tomorrow, or perhaps the next writing session but one, i’ll be onto Chapter Eight.

Eight!

Brief update on this morning’s post which went out this afternoon

I have typed nearly 4,000 words this afternoon/evening, and that’s about 2/3 of what was sitting there untyped. Reached stuff written in June, and stopped. Not sure how long it took me – far longer than it should have with a past as a touch typist – but however long it was, i’m hurting all over from it.

But it means i will total about 47 or 48,000 when it’s all typed (without scribbling any more), and i have arbitrarily designated the end of a chapter so that brings me into Chapter Seven. This number, being close to 50,000, makes me feel good.

By being bigger than 40,000 it makes me feel good, as well. That ’40’ has been stuck in my consciousness for too many weeks.

I wondered about skipping some of this back-into-the-groove scribbling – not typing it up at all. Lucky i did in the end, as some ideas that came to nothing may still be useful in one way or another. For example, i set up a wedding party gathering ahead of T and another character as they go along a street, with mental images of entertaining chaos, and then after a few days away from my big pink book had forgotten all about it. But at a different moment in the story it still may be handy.

What eventually worked was thinking around the characters, reviewing in my head what we know so far about each of them and their motivations and individual stories, BUT instead of doing that ‘straight’, doing it via T. He did the thoughts about them, and i wrote down what he was thinking. It combined getting me back into that world, and his head, with reminding myself what was going on (in a way that reading my notes or summary doesn’t do) and also, of course, getting me back into the pen-in-hand habit.

None of it will stay, i should think, but the bold cuts are not for Draft One. That’s why i typed it all, too – trying to stay out of edit mode for the time being.

And that’s why i didn’t do anything about the writing itself, which appalled me. (Quite apart from the handwriting, which almost defeated me.) Repetitious, inevitably since i wasn’t focused, but also long-winded, full of dreadful grammar, terrible phrasing, and inconsistencies; stylistically clunky… just as my conversation when i’m tired goes round in circles and takes five sentences to explain something that would have taken one if i’d been about to remember the right word. I was aware that it was drivel while i wrote it, but ploughed on, and it’s even worse when looked at from the ‘outside’. And i don’t care, cos i can rewrite the bits where something happens that’s worth keeping, and scrap all the rest. It’s ALL first draft, so i’m still including it in my word count!

Not such a brief update after all. No time to make it shorter!

Can you feel the relief? It may last me the whole weekend. 🙂