Blog Beginnings

I'm writing a novel. I can actually say it now and mean it. I wrote a prologue a year ago, hoping it would take me somewhere. It didn't, but I was happy with the prose regardless. So, not wanting to give up again, I wrote the first chapter and it stalled too. In the words of Miss O'Hara, "Where will I go? What will I do?"

I joined a writer's community and I can't tell you how grateful I am. Turns out, you don't have to write the first chapter first. You can hop about the story like a rabbit, writing scenes anywhere in the wip (work-in-progress). The story begins to tell itself, eventually one scene meeting up with the other, shaking hands and patting each other on the back. It's exhilarating. Some writers call it "writing in chunks" or "chunk writing". When I think of the word chunks, I think about throwing up, so I prefer to call it "writing in fragments". Sits better in my belly.

I can write one thousand words a day or more when Fritz isn't hovering or Dave the Cat isn't sitting on the keyboard. The next several days I'll spend fiddling with the scene, tweaking, editing, preening, adding salt or sugar to taste. I love this part - finding words and phrases to show visuals, emotion, ways to move the story forward by saying a lot or a little. (Less is more) It's the joy of writing and the pleasure of knowing the final result works .... well, works for the moment. Things change however, when you write a scene placed much later in the work and realize you've already said such and such in a scene coming earlier. Now you have to go back and fix such and such to make so and so work, thus urging you to tweak. I love to tweak, so I'm not bothered by these foibles.

Back to the thousand words a day thing. Yes, it's doable. If I just wrote and wrote and worried about the tweaking at the end of the novel, once all the various scenes fused themselves together, I could finish a 100k novel in three months, but it would be really, really bad. Lots of writers do it and don't mess with anything until "The End" is typed at the bottom of the last page. Every writer eventually finds their way. Every writer has a different process and there are no rules, other than owning a copy of Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White and keeping beside the computer. (No, I have no financial interest in the book, just interest in general )

Therein lieth my first post.