Success!!

I guess I took my own advice to you all last time. Funny how that works-- often when we 'preach' we preach mostly to ourselves.

After much hemming and hawing and procrastinating, I forced myself to sit down yesterday and get to work on my new project. I did a little bit of note-typing-up, some paper shuffling, some thinking, and then wrote. Just wrote. Usually I pause and reread every sentence or paragraph as I go, and there were a couple of tweaks made here and there. But this time around I made myself go. Get to it. None of this dilly dallying of writing/editing. Editing can come later, it truly can. That is one of my worst faults as a writer, I think. I am slow as it is, but when you stop and agonize over every sentence as you write it, you become even slower. The most important thing in a first rough draft (and that is indeed the important thing to remember: rough and first) is to get the ideas on the page, to form the shape of the story. Later the details, the color of the eyes, the shape of the nose, can be filled in. Whether you use paint or chisel to do so will be discovered somewhere along the way.

In experimenting with this direct form of writing (as in actually writing, with no other distractions? Huh, what a concept!) I was able to chug out about 25 pages of raw material over the course of three separate chapters. I wrote these chapters out of order and then organized around and among them, making notes on where I needed to go back in and elaborate or what needed to come next. I was exhausted by the end of it, but I was elated. Though I knew I couldn't write a single word more, my heart was still pounding and I felt as if I could go on forever...I almost wished I could, so impatient I was to discover the rest of the story...

It has begun, now...I hope to finish long before Christmas. And I will continue to restrain myself most admirably from editing as I go. At this point in the writing process, I will only add new material to the pages every time I sit down to work. In that way I will be able to create a single, cohesive draft that doesn't undulate in quality from most-frequently edited to most-often edited.

Write first, edit later.