Sunday, April 5, 2009

update

I woke up this morning and, feeling the need to do writing, as a cross between a duty and a necessity, I sat down and wrote the second half of a story I started several months ago. I just pulled up the document file and finished it off. I drank coffee while working on it. Then I had breakfast in the mid afternoon.

It's not done, by any means. There is a rather longish speech that takes up the center of the piece needs to be drastically reedited, just completely rewritten. I think the phrasing is not nearly precise enough, and it doesn't truly fit the character's personality. It should be a bit more rehearsed, and thus more literary. He has given speeches like this before; he has had practice. Right now, it's just kind of a grab bag of information. I was just trying to get down the facts he would say, so that they would be concrete and not floating around in my brain. Now they need to be beaten into shape.

Still, I feel that happy sense of accomplishment. I am particularly proud of the two epilogues to the story's main event, which I think do quite a nice job of commenting on the the main action without being explicit about it, and actually being quite casual in presentation and seemingly beside the point.

Overall, I feel like this forcing myself to write, and to write in my own voice, is doing me quite a bit of good. It's becoming part of my arsenal of activities, and I think I am slowly improving at expressing myself in words at will (slowly), giving myself an easier facility at controlling my meaning with language, because I am getting in touch with the process of engaging that speech faculty. There are still bumps along the way, and I am sure if I went back and read this stuff I would notice all kinds of mistakes and grammatical errors, but there's writing and there's editing and right now I am concentrating on the more essential of the two. It's a process. I need to build the foundation before I start worrying about the decorations.