Some Days the Bear Gets You

Well that was humbling.

After a great first day, I found myself on day two stumbling and bumbling. Wrote about 600 words, deleted most, tried again. Couldn't come up with anything that worked to get me into the story. Clever? Maybe. But useful? Not at all. So I backed up and tried again. And again.

The problem, I suspected, was that my opening was kind of flashy but didn't get me into the story. Had trouble transitioning. So I started the story in a slightly different place, just a little farther along.

It worked, but I'm not there yet. Took several false starts before I finally got right into the action, in a place that works. By then, the afternoon was over and I had to run around picking people up, dropping them off, the usual.

So my word count isn't impressive. Oh, if you count all the false starts, it's probably good – probably more than 1,000 words. But what I have left after all teh deletions and fiddling, is: 54 words. So what with all the backing up and adjusting and fiddling, the grand (?) total is now slightly LESS than it was the day before: 1,270 words.

But that's better than no words. I'm not happy about it, but at least I kept pushing until I found soemthing that works. And it does work.

Some days you get the bear. Some days the bear gets you. But I'm back at it, a little mauled but pushing on.

Scribbling Continues as Story Grows

As I scribble ideas in the notebook (and when I say scribbling, I mean scribbling. See photo of my notebook pages.) the story is turning and changing in my hands, becoming more – more layered, more complex, more detailed. Better. Bigger. Stronger. And, I hope, more interesting and entertaining.

It's exciting, no doubt about that. I have had the thrill – a cliched thrill, true, but still a thrill – of sitting straight up in bed, and grabbing my notebook. Sometimes it's just a word or two, but I know what it means when I look back and see "Fern," or "the janitor." Sometimes it's a sentence or two, even a couple of lines of dialogue. And often an admonition – "Be Funny!"

I don't want it to lose the tone and feel that I originally came up with. I want it to be fun, quick, light. I've got a ton of good background material from my research, and now I have to guard against burying the story under too much details, or too many layers, and lose the carefree spirit that I think will drive the book – and then drive the reader through the book.

That's one of things I have to watch for. I don't want to write "too smart." That sounds horribly egotistical, doesn't it? But it's something I've been warned about more than once and by more than one reader.

Serve the story. That's always the number one maxim, isn't it? Whatever you do, whatever you write, whatever choices you make in the story, always be sure that doing it serves the story.

Almost ready to start writing.