A Good Night's Work?

Well, for the first time in quite a while I was relatively pleased with last night’s fiction work. A couple of days ago I started rewriting a story that I laid out in a basic outline nearly a year earlier. The story is a fantasy called “Sundered Man.” It’s going to be short, probably less than 3000 words. I started work fairly early in the night, around 9:00, but things wouldn’t come together. The outline still sounded like an outline; it was all telling and little showing. My resolve weakened and I took a long break to play a game called Age of Empires. But an hour later I was back on the story and gradually things started to flow. I was rather pleased with the last two-thirds of my night’s work, although the story is still so weak in the first section that it’ll need a complete rewrite. Still, it was good to feel a little bit of juice flowing.

Even after years of writing I still have to be reeducated. Sometimes things don’t flow but you just have to keep hammering on. Sometimes the first stuff out of your brain will have to be thrown away or revised to the point where you can’t recognize it. But still you have to put that stuff down. You have to let it bleed to clean the lines.