I've been offline so long it's almost hard to know where to start. Life is rough these days.
First things first. I finally, finally finished my novel draft. I really shouldn't call it a first draft since I made the horrific mistake of writing a chapter, editing it to death, then writing another, editing and so forth. I'd always start the day by re-reading what I'd written the day before. Chopping here, snipping there. It took me about a year and a half to realize that that method simply does not work. Now, I know there are those that believe it does. And because I believe that the creative process is so different for everyone, I should retract the former statement and simply say ... it doesn't work for me. There are those people who can't dream of going on to the next chapter without solidly polishing the former and these are the people who will probably end up with a first draft that needs significantly less revision than those who allow themselves to do exactly as Anne Lamott suggests "write a shitty first draft." But the one thing I have come to discover is that you can revise until you're blue in the face. Even when the book goes to print, a good writer will always look back and say, "Gee, I really don't like that sentence," or "Man, I should have made Charachter B come in on chapter four instead of six." I mean, there's always, always something to edit. And my thing is, if you have limited time, as is the case for me (read: you have to work for a living), then you really do have to make every moment count. If you have three hours with which to delve into your writing but you spend an hour and a half editing what you've done yesterday ... well, you do the math. How much time is left to propel the story forward?
I think Melanie Bishop sums it up well in an old issue of Glimmer Train's Writer's Ask. She said something I think is very useful advice, particularly for first time authors:
"Just get the story out there, A to Z. You can always go back later and make it beautiful." A friend had given her this advice when she was working on her first novel. She says, "What a relief. By not even reading the beginning I could just start right out where I'd left off and save a lot of time. Sometimes I needed to read a paragraph or a page, just to remind myself where I was, what the tone of the section was, or whatever. But I forbade myself from reading the thing over from page one. While this approach may leave you with an enormous amount of revision after your frist draft is done, it allows you to proceed each day without falling into a crippling critique of what you've already writen.... Psychologically it is so crucial to feel that sense of forward movement, of momentum....So much work left to do but so much already accomplished--the weight of it there in your hand."
And this is the bottom line. There's nothing like having a finished product in your hand. No matter how lumpy, awkward, disjointed, ragged, you know that at the end of the day you've got it all down on paper. If I had a dime for every person I've met over the past 5 years who was writing a novel, I'd be a millionaire. But if I had a dime for everyone whose finished I'd be dead ass broke. So, all of that to say that after a year and a half of self-editing, of giving my work to others to be read and critiqued (you know, the writer's group thing) ... I finally realized that I needed to hammer this thing out and I get it done. I gave myself permission to write a shitty first draft. Now it's done.
So right now I've got several things going on. Number One, I created a story board. Just a simple piece of oaktag with sixteen slots (made from index cards taped to the oaktag). I plan to write the goal of each chapter on an index card and insert it into it's corresponding slot. Since I'm highly visual, this works well for me as I can really see, OK -- is the story moving forward? Does this scene make any sense to the story as a whole? Number Two, I'm delving deeper into my charachters. My protagonist's wife is a real snob and since I'm not a snob I had an awful hard time getting my arms around who this woman is and what her motivation(s) is/are. I also didn't understand her charachter arc -- how she changes in the story. So rather than spend a whole lot of time struggling to know her in the beginning, I just did a charachter profile and put in as much as I knew and figured I'd trust Wisdom to give me the rest down the line. Well, I've learned so much about this woman, it's just amusing. So, I'm spending time with her right now. Third, I've ordered a few texts: Self Editing for Fiction Writers and also a few books on writing a synopsis. Though I have an outline, I do need to get this synopsis down too.

Another significant thing that happened over this past very miserable, cold, wet, dreary winter is that I just couldn't get myself going on my computer. Every time I tried to sit and write, I'd wind up falling asleep and awakening to a blank white screen. I've heard J California Cooper say that she wouldn't dream of trying to write on a computer. The technology alone interferes with her creative process. I wasn't quite sure what was going on. I was still working full time at that point and the idea of going back to my computer after 7 hours spent at a computer was just daunting. Somewhere around December I decided to finish up the novel long hand. That's right. Paper and pen. Now the task at hand is to type in, oh about fifteen chapters or so but can I tell you how liberating that was? It felt like I was just writing letters or jotting notes in my journal. And if I wrote something I didn't like but kind of wanted to keep for later consideration, I'd just draw a line through it -- as opposed to hitting the back space button which eliminates it all together and that's not good for the creative process because you never know if you might want to use that thought/idea/sentence somewhere else. I do believe that when we are writing with our full hearts, each thought comes for a reason. At this early stage it is not for us to judge (read: edit), but to let the words be and find out where they belong later.

So that's what I've got my hands deep in right now. And since I'm a goal setter I'll have to say that I'm striving for a solid rewrite, in which at least the first four chapters are ready to be shown to my agent, by December 2003.

peace always,
angel