Tonight is Writing Night!
Our friend Bethany is coming over and then we all sit down and work on writing! Whether it’s revising a piece, writing something new (or in my case sometimes knitting or making icons), we all sit down and create.
It’s awesome! I feel like we get a good amount done. This week I’m making more revisions on my Luca story. Last week I worked on it by gutting the “first draft”. The story was done for Nano in 2005. It was pretty much Luca’s story with a ton of other people in it. Last week I tore out twenty thousand words.
It felt kind of staggering. But they really had to go. The story was a loose and meadering beast of a thing and it didn’t have focus. It also didn’t have a central problem or conflict. Without something like that, and some direction, it was really just mired in tangled vines. So I hauled out a writerly machete and hacked the vines away. What I’m left with is a somewhat bedraggled and unkempt disjointed mess…
But you know what? I LOVE IT. I love my little mess. It’s got bits all over the place and characters are undergoing some brain surgery and reshaping. But it’s all a good thing. It’s going to come out all the better for it. I’m also taking it through a modified version of the Snowflake method of writing a novel. I have to admit, I tend to snicker just a little bit at the idea of something named that because it immediately makes me think of someone going on about their novel and referring to it as a ‘precious snowflake’. Which is ridiculous.
Mine isn’t a snowflake. Mine is a mess of vines and dirt and greenery.
But enough with the metaphor. I’m working on it. Slowly but surely!
And tonight there will be writerly companionship and there will also be baked polenta with spaghetti sauce and cheese. What more could I ask for?
