The scientific name for an animal that doesn't either run from or fight its enemies is lunch.
-- Michael Friedman
In the immortal words of Winnie the Pooh, yesterday was a blustery day. March lived up to her reputation by coming in with a ferocity.* And what's in the forecast for our area for the next seven days? Partly cloudy to mostly sunny. Mother Nature is a fickle female.
One of the goals I set for myself was to start walking again the 1st of March. So much for that. Who wants to walk in a thunderstorm? Needless to say, that item got shoved over to today's to-do list.
Also on the list is making up for lost time with the manuscript. I've been poking at it all week, rearranging things and editing. Here is where I proffer an illustration that writing is a process:
I started this novel a year and a half ago. I plugged away at it during NaNoWriMo 2005 and got my 50,000 words in. Through much debate and discussion with my fabulous critique partner, as well as a bit of input from the awesome women who make up our writers' group (although they probably don't realize they input anything as far as this decision is concerned), I came to the realization that it was time to ... how did they put it, JT? Kill my darlings. I'd written two previous books with these same characters, but for all intents and purposes, and for reasons that are just too complex to delve into here, they don't count.
Even though it's my [cough]*sixth*[cough] manuscript, this book, if it happens to be the one that lands me an agent or a deal or both, is going to be my "first novel". This is actually kind of exciting. I have an advantage, of sorts. I've written a lot of stuff already - does practice make perfect? Oh, heck no. BUT, I've learned so much from writing the other [cough]*five*[cough] manuscripts that I'm approaching this one with an eye toward making it the best book I've ever written, utilizing what I've learned along the way.
So, the process: I wrote a synopsis/plot summary that didn't include the old characters. I went through the manuscript and basically gutted it, taking out all the references to those characters and their "personal" story lines. The main crux of the book, the story itself, I left in place, and a couple of the characters were replaced with some new faces. There are a few passages I wrote before that were worth salvaging, and it's from those that I'm building the rest of the story according to the synopsis I wrote.
Is it working? So far, yes, actually. But this week I reached a point where I needed to really fix things, so instead of buckling down and writing, and reaching my daily 1,500- to 2,000-word goal (yeah, we've upped the stakes a little), I've been nitpicking, cutting, pasting, researching, editing. Still, I've managed to increase the word count by about 2,400 words in the last week. Not too bad considering there's been a lot more subtracting than adding.
Dave White is a member of the Killer Year Class of 2007 and is, I've discovered, a young man wise beyond his years. He recently posted this diatribe on what we should be concentrating on. To quote in part:
Writing a good book.
Writing.
The craft.
That's the most important thing.
We're WRITERS.
Well said, Dave. And in your honor, this is what I'm doing today. The lion is at the door, and I ain't gonna be lunch.
So, with a bit of Holst (First Suite in E-flat) in the CD player, I'm off and running ... er, writing.
Read a book. It's good for you.
=) JB
*We dodged a bullet here in Middle Tennessee, thank goodness, but please say a short prayer for the families of the people killed at the high school in Enterprise, Alabama and elsewhere. Our thoughts and prayers are with them.
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