I'm at the dangerous point of a manuscript. The dreaded middle. Wherein all the characters have been introduced, all the conflicts have been set up, and I know how it all ends. Part of me wants to clap my hands and say, "...and now we're done!!" and move on. But there's no book there yet. The story still only exists in my head. This could be enough if I were only creating stories for my own amusement, but I'm not. I'm creating stories for everyone else's amusement (or entertainment).
What we have now are characters and a plot and ending. So, how do we get from here to there.
As one of my mentors once said (he probably said it more than once, but you get the picture), "you write it."
To which I asked, "And just how do I go about doing that?"
"You put words on the page in order."
And that's what I do when I'm stuck. I remember that all I have to do, even when feeling terribly uninspired, is "put words on the page in order." They don't have to be well crafted sentences or witty dialog....first time through, they just have to be words on the page in order.
And so, there you have it. They answer to the mystery of how do I get from here to there....say it with me:
Put words on the page, in order
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
3 comments:
It's beating the internal censor into submission that's the tricky part. The censor that's convinced those words aren't in the right order, no matter how many ways you try to arrange them. If you could get your cats to shred my censor, there'd be much rejoicing.
Neither cat is very good at shredding censors. However, writing Morning Pages, a la The Artist's Way, is.
Later in the process, you don't like the order, you re-write.
Post a Comment