Re: Doing The Narrative Drains

On Thu, 3 May 2007 17:29:05 -0500, Suzanne Blom wrote:

"R.J. Anderson" <synaesthete@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ft-dnagVcfEv36fbnZ2dnUVZ_uuqnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
/snip/

I was also an obsessive polish-as-you-go type, so that by
the time I reached the end of the book my prose was pretty shiny

Me too.


(but I
often had to rewrite whole sections of the story from scratch to make it
hang together).

With this book, I spent three months brainstorming, researching, and
painstakingly outlining the entire plot before I started, and I am forcing
myself *not* to revise anything I've written so far but to always keep
plugging ahead at the rate of 2000 words a day. I was hoping this might
make me more efficient, and I'm not sure that it won't, in the end -- but
it's definitely a major adjustment for me. I keep wanting to be happy with
and proud of the stuff I've written already, and since it's still very
much in First Draft mode, I can't feel that way.

Sounds to me like you're got to let yourself polish. I suspect otherwise
you're going to have problems when you get done as well because you're not
used to the amount of revision this will take, either.


R.J., I wonder if you can do different 'levels' of polishing. I warm up by
doing a very 'light level', just sort of skimming along for the general
flow, and not stopping to do any hard work. When an obvious fix suggests
itself, I do it, but otherwise whenever I see something that bothers me I
just flag it for later attention.


R.L.
--
delaman@xxxxxxxxx works, emails welcome
http://houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com/
.

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