A True Finish

Posted on July 22, 2002 in Writing

I gave a true finish to Chapter 2 today. The previous version has too few words. It had a preliminary sketchiness that afflicts my writing when I am in too big a hurry to get done. I think I was thinking too hard about the impending reward, the end of the week, and the humor I intended to introduce in the next chapter. I rushed to the end and left it dangling with a sentence more mangled than the road kill it attempted to describe. Over the weekend, I fiddled with it in my head. I realized that I had lied to myself, that this was not the finished first draft at all. I had neither prepared my readers nor myself for the third chapter. So I did it again. I did it right this time.

Celebration

Posted on July 19, 2002 in Writing

I treated myself to a Raspberry Tango at Tully’s today as a reward for finishing Chapter 2 of my “fiction project” yesterday. Things haven’t been moving along quite as quickly as I expected, but I’ve got a first draft. How did Trollope do it? How does Joyce Carol Oates do it? Whatever is wrong with it can be either rewritten or excised.

I tend to start out very sketchy when I write. Before I tackle a chapter, I make a lot of notes on the people and the places they interact. As I fill up pads, I number the pages and record a brief note about each page in a notebook I keep in a box at the foot of the bed.

Writing’s a lot of thrashing about, false starts, and sometimes a joy ride. I find that nearly every article I write in long hand ends up getting fatter as I type it up. I’ve got to do that if I am going to do what I think good writing is about, namely conjuring up phantoms to deceive the senses. I seek to create that lively, soft ripple that washes over my brain when I read a lively or a vivid passage. I often have to keep revisiting a piece before I get it right. Chapter 2 now ends with a decidedly ungrammatical sentence. I know a few other passages that need work. They’re like anorexic girls now: I need to feed them, get them to plump out, resist the urge to let them vomit up every progress and make me start again from skeletal beginnings. If I do it the way it should be done, reading these passages should evoke that exquisite chill I so love when I read a particularly poetic piece of work. But for now, Chapter 2 gets backed up on a disk, stored in a couple of places “off-site”, and put in a loose leaf notebook where it can age gracefully for a while as I struggle with the next series of scenes.