In which Carousel Sun breaks 50K. . .only, doesn't

[rolanni]

I may have mentioned before that I'm trying to hit a firm 2,000 words/day on Carousel Sun while I'm here at Temp Headquarters.  The goal is to take home at least 60,000 darn near finished words on this project and the notes for the next.  That's the goal.

So, anyhow, yesterday I saw that if I wrote a smidge more than 3,000 words, I would break 50K on the project, and have Half a Book!  So I pushed, a little, and I broke the Big 50, and this morning I read what I had written, over coffee and oatmeal.

And of course, it's the wrong 3,000 words.

Mind you, it's a good 3,000 words and it delivers information that Kate will need, later.  But not here.  So, the chapter goes into the File of Holding and the manuscript meter gets set back to 47,000 words total.

The plan for as soon as I finish my coffee and find a sweatshirt, is to go for a walk, figure out what Really Happens Next, and sit down and Actually Write That. 

Elsewhere on Teh Intertubes yesterday, I had a conversation with a young writer who felt that writers who walk away from their work when "it gets hard" are whiners and not taking their craft seriously.  Her point was that if you walked away every time a piece of dialogue wasn't working out, you'd never get anything done.  Which -- OK; I can see that.

However, taking a break, even walking away for hours, days, weeks does have its place in the process of writing.  Perhaps some writers can sit down at nine in the morning and hit the keys for six or eight hours straight, and produce sparkling copy.  Most writers I know. . .don't do it that way.  As someone else in yesterday's conversation commented, writers do most of their writing away from the keyboard.

So, my coffee's done, and my sweatshirt's right over there on the hook.

See y'all later; I'll be out for a while, writing.

Comments

[kalilama.livejournal.com]

You might enjoy this excerpt from poet Wislawa Szymborska's acceptance speech for the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature:

"It's not accidental that film biographies of great scientists and artists are produced in droves. The more ambitious directors seek to reproduce convincingly the creative process that led to important scientific discoveries or the emergence of a masterpiece. And one can depict certain kinds of scientific labor with some success. Laboratories, sundry instruments, elaborate machinery brought to life: such scenes may hold the audience's interest for a while. And those moments of uncertainty - will the experiment, conducted for the thousandth time with some tiny modification, finally yield the desired result? - can be quite dramatic. Films about painters can be spectacular, as they go about recreating every stage of a famous painting's evolution, from the first penciled line to the final brush-stroke. Music swells in films about composers: the first bars of the melody that rings in the musician's ears finally emerge as a mature work in symphonic form. Of course this is all quite naive and doesn't explain the strange mental state popularly known as inspiration, but at least there's something to look at and listen to.

But poets are the worst. Their work is hopelessly unphotogenic. Someone sits at a table or lies on a sofa while staring motionless at a wall or ceiling. Once in a while this person writes down seven lines only to cross out one of them fifteen minutes later, and then another hour passes, during which nothing happens ... Who could stand to watch this kind of thing?"

[jessie-c.livejournal.com]

Leaving a scene to ripen (or even to ferment so it gets all bubbly and fizzy with giddy-making magic) is not quite the same as "walking away". Conversely, struggling with that scene before it's ripe and coming out with a half-baked mixed metaphor may not be is most unlikely to produce Great Art.

[the wol (from livejournal.com)]

My favorite description of the creative process: "Sometimes you have to wrestle the angel for quite a while before it will bless you."