Monday, April 27, 2009

Go with the flow

The story I am working on is kind of odd, because I don't know where it goes, quite. There is a faint flicker of an idea of an ending, but I don't know if I will use it. I am just writing the story, kind of one sentence in front of the next, trying to keep it along some pathway. A while back I wrote 800 words in a mad, late-night rush, but felt that I hadn't communicated all I wanted, hadn't set the mood as I wanted and pointed where the story was supposed to go. So I started over and have written about halfway through those words at much greater length and detail, and have written over 1100 words about those first four hundred or so words. Hmm, you know, it actually seems way more lopsided in terms of expansion than those numbers suggest. Single sentences have become paragraphs, or short scenes. Hopefully, writing it like this will give me a better idea of where it is going. I just write something, keeping the work in mind, (I have a deadline) and writing the next words whenever they come to me, whenever they do. I don't overthink it, or worry too much about whether I should be sitting there thinking, or taking a break. I just kind of feel my way through it. The real question, is just having the right sentence to put next, and writing that one down. Its a different approach for me, but I enjoy the exercise of it.

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