Works in Progress
First draft:
Editing: The Amulet of Sìochàin
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| Creativity Workshop: Weeks Four And Five |
| Saturday, 05 June 2010 08:34 |
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Towards the end of last week, after completing my third short story for the Creativity Workshop, I realised two things: one, that my chances of completing my second draft before the 31st May were next to none, and two, that I'd already achieved what I'd set out to try and do in the first block. I'd explored objective POV in my first story, and weeks two and three explored first person viewpoints of two of my characters. I'd already told most of the story (and had creeped myself out considerably in the process with my shapeshifter killing maniac), and so I decided to take Week Five off and concentrate on my revisions. It went well for the first couple of days - on Monday I added 8K, and on Tuesday I added another 6K. I'm now up to 91K in total, which is about 20K more than my first draft. I think the structure's much stronger, and I'm pretty happy with my characters. I still have a few more scenes to fix and write though - the second half of this week has been less productive. This morning I got up to write and realised that I just wasn't in the right frame of mind, so I've been finding new pictures for my Daily Photo Prompt blog instead. Merrilee put up a great blog about writer's block, and for me, this is how it usually manifests itself. If I force myself to try and write, I'll get frustrated with myself, so I've learnt that it's usually about needing something specific. Often it's because I haven't been getting enough creative input (not reading enough, mainly), or simply because I'm too tired. This time, I think it's the latter - I had a dreadful night's sleep for no good reason. I usually find that being productive in other ways can help me quite a lot in getting past this, so I think this morning will be dedicated to housework. The laundry's already done, the kitchen is next in line for a cleaning, and then I'll try and get a bit of writing done. I've rarely found myself blocked because of the actual story itself, but it has happened - in the first draft of Amulet, I wrote a particular scene and then just couldn't get past it. It took me a couple of days to figure out that while my hero might be a bit of a bad guy on the outside, I'd taken his evil tendencies a few steps too far until he was behaving wildly out of character. For one of the first times ever, I scrapped that whole scene in the middle of the first draft and wrote what actually needed to happen instead. I'm a big believer in writing through to the end of that first draft, but sometimes, it just can't happen. I have also found from time to time that I'm really not as much of a pantser as I once thought - sometimes, I just need to brainstorm until I figure out what needs to happen next. So. This week, I haven't been working on a short story, and I'm happy about that. I couldn't have given it any kind of decent attention, and the story I was planning just didn't interest me that much anymore since I already knew everything about it from the other three stories in this block. Next week, I think I'm going to wing it a bit. At first I was very frustrated not to have reached my goal, but I'm over that now - I realised quickly that there were a whole lot of reasons why the second draft done was taking longer than I'd planned, and so I'm just going to get it done as soon as I can. I think it still needs to take priority for me at the moment though, so I may take this week just as a planning week, with my goal for the second block being to produce three short stories again. It depends - if I manage to get to the end of this draft in the next few days, I'll be right back on my AlphaSmart working on another story. But I want to give myself the space I need to finish this draft. So, that's where I am. And until I'm done with this draft, I'll probably be a bit quiet. Could be three days, could be a couple of weeks - but I'll let you know. ;) |
Comments
Good luck with finishing the draft. You can do it! And hope to see you back to your short stories soon.
Hope the rewrite continues to progress as it needs to in order to meet deadlines.
Sorry I've been absent and not commenting on your updates lately -- I had internet issues. :(