Okay I'm going to call this thing I've been working on Project SHK. Today I got 1347 words, which is pretty good. How many of them survive from the first draft to the second? Who knows. Probably many of the words will survive, but will be placed in a different order and context.
I heard a guy call into the Diane Rehm show, I don't even remember the topic but he was talking about how he wanted to write a book and said "I almost have it all worked out in my head and once I do then I can start writing." Dude, that's not how it works. None of the words I wrote today were planned out in advance. I had a vague idea about three characters that I was going to introduce, but once I started typing they turned out very different from the ideas I'd already had. I also introduced a group of characters I'd never even thought of before and took the plot for this chapter in a different direction than I'd planned.
Again, who knows if any of this will stick, but the point is that these ideas came to life on the page, not in my head. That brings me around to one of my favorite quotes about writing, from Merlin Mann, "You can write you way out of a thinking block but you can never think your way out of a writing block." I keep that at the forefront of my mind because in my case it couldn't be more true.
No comments:
Post a Comment