It’s Thursday, and that means there is a long road ahead. This journey happens every Thursday, which is a dedicated writing day for yours truly. It’s a long road, full of danger, dirt and grit that gets under the nails, a road that turns my feet dusty feet dries out my tongue. It could lead to crusty scars, soot in the eyeballs, maybe even diarrhea if I’m not careful. There are many perils ahead. Today’s goal is to knock out at least 1,500 words, 2,000 if the conditions are right. That’s what the road sign says. On top of that, I will be doing terrifically exciting post-writing activities like cleaning my house, doing laundry and salivating over Okami.
But the work comes first, dammit. I’m gonna work hard like an ant, while refraining from making more self-referential jokes about queens.
This shot of an ant can be found over at Myrmician’s Flickr page. The ant, she be bitchin’! Wow. I said “bitchin’”. What’s happening to me? Arthropod drool. Tongue wag. Please do visit his account and tell him how awesome his shots are.
While we’re on the subject of writing, let’s talk about drafts. And not the kind that sluice down your face after the fourth glass while you crave a Camel Light and you begin flirting with the bartender. No, I mean the draft of a novel. As you know, I am participating in NaNoWriMo for fun and to add a slight punch of added challenge to my writing schedule. Over the past three years I have been lucky to find out what writing discipline and habits I required in order to complete my manuscripts, so I am not using NaNo as a way to find writing habits that help me to complete projects. I think I have those already in place. If anything, NaNo is a way to stick to my projected word count and to get me closer to the rewriting process. When I start a new project next year, the timing may not coincide the way Carapace did with this year’s NanNoWriMo, though it would be nice to do it again. We shall see. I work generally on my own, kiddies. I’ve been called a misanthrope at times, and I’m sure much worse. But it’s all right, because left to my own devices, I push on. I get the words down. That would make me almost the opposite of an animal like the ant like the one pictured above, because ants work in communities, contributing little by little to the colony. I leave that kind of work and collaboration for the day job, so you can call me a partial ant. When I write, I go solo. So if at work and play I’m like and ant, what am I when I sit down in front of the computer? A…praying mantis? I’m gonna think about that.
I have received some comments from you Gentle Readers that marvel at the sheer volume of words I am writing in project Carapace. What I’d like to remind everyone is that just because I write 1,000 in a day, or 50,000 or 10,000 words in the whole first draft, it does not mean they are all good words. Or quality words. The real writing for me comes in the re-write, when I can delete a lot of the redundancies, cheap-shot cliches and adverbs (death to the adverb!) out of the manuscript. That is also the time I reorganize chapters and chronology, fix continuity, do additional research. More than anything, the rewrite period is when I really zero in on the words themselves, how they sound, how they work next to one another, how they fit the characters, and how the characters fit the words. The stuff that comes out in first draft almost never sounds decent to me. I’ve taken on some special challenges in the Carapace project, mostly by limiting my word count and by focusing in very peculiar ways on plot. An open ended sprawl of a novel may come easily to me, but it may not facilitate me creating a novel that is compelling. So that’s part of this particular manuscript: structure, and lots of it.
So when you see me post my word counts day by day, rest assured that I am not going back and revising and re-reading much. I don’t do it. I have had to train myself not to. I am pushing forward so that the first draft finds an ending. If at the end of the first draft I find I have to re-think the whole project, so be it. But in the meantime, I can’t re-write what is not written already.
All right, that’s enough for now. As I noted earlier, you can see the one lone excerpt from Carapace over at my NaNo page, and you can also buy this quarter’s issue of The Willows, which features my Weird story “Hybridae.” I did receive word that some shipments of the magazine are behind due to large orders, so hip hip hooray for tardiness.
I’d love to know how you treat your writing process. Do you edit as you go? Or do you spit out a draft first? What’s your preferred method?
And we’re ticking down to NaNo, my little worms. Now don’t make me get out the whip to get you going. Fill your damn notebook and keyboards.
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