There are days when, no matter how much I desperately want to sit down and write…I don’t get the chance.
Or, if I do, it is at a point when my brain is so dead that I couldn’t keep my eyes open long enough to string together “Sally sells seashells by the seashore.”
Thus, sometimes I must settle for a few hastily scrawled sentences in my notebook while I’m at work if I want any modicum of productivity.
Many of the sentences aren’t even complete thoughts.
Some are plot points. Milestones, developmental highlights. Some are character thoughts and perspectives—biases that color an individual’s responses or reactions. Little random pieces of insight that, while useless in and of themselves, help shape the nature of the characters in my head more clearly. So that I in turn can portray them to the reader without info-dumping about the color of one’s eyes, the shape of their nose… really, how much does that matter. A reader decides for themselves what the character looks like. And more often than not, what they see has little relation to what the writer saw, or describes them to be.
Of course, that’s why I write books, and don’t make movies. I love leaving that for the reader to envision for themselves. I give enough to form the person in the mind of the audience…and beyond that, they can take the bit in their teeth and run with it.
In the very least, though, I’m putting words down on paper. The ideas are congealing in my mind. So that, hopefully, on the occasions when I do sit down to write, I can do so productively and in earnest. Without being mocked by the blinking cursor. Or at least, not being mocked too terribly.
The Trunked Novel is coming along, slowly. I still only have a vague notion of where it is trying to take me. And only a fuzzy, unfocused foggy dream-glimpse of where it will end up. The bad guys lose. Sort of. The good guys win. Sort of. Fin.
And Black…well. A part of me dreads tackling another round of edits, but there are a number of pacing and structural issues that definitely need addressed—I was aware of them, glossed over them when I did the heavy rewrite of the ending. Now I need to go back through and strengthen, and polish. That? Is going to demand some planning, the likes of which I’ve not had to do before. Or rather, that I’ve not bothered to tackle before. FOAT/DEoH didn’t have any excessively deep plot twists. …Not that I’m aware of, anyways. Not the kind that needed shadowing and suggesting and development the way Black’s does. I’ve never considered hardcore mystery writing to be one of my strong suits. We’ll see if I can devise a way to make this work.
Time to teach this old dog some new tricks.
chirp
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