Should have called this blog “Exquisite later” since I much prefer fantasizing about getting things done to actually doing them. The year of finishing, that’s what I blithely said last week about my approach to 2012. Today? Forget it. Just want to listen to the rain on the roof.
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I have been thinking about “The Booker Rebellion” for seven years. I have been writing it in my spare time for five. And yesterday, a day of furlough from my newspapering job, I finished the final draft of the first chapter. It is good. It is pointing, finally, in the correct direction. I am easy in my heart.
I don’t know why I had to write so many bad first chapters (I think at least seven).
Now to overhaul the next 19 chapters. Yesterday, as I began examining how this rewrite will fit with the rest of the story, I could feel things falling into place, like the tumblers in a lock lining up at last because I found the right key.
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Writers argue, always, about careful crafting on the front end of a project vs. headlong writing to get the story in place before fine tuning sentences and paragraphs.
Here’s what Annie Dillard said about that:
“The reason to perfect a piece of prose as it progresses — to secure each sentence before building on it — is that original writing fashions a form. It unrolls out into nothingness. It grows cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; any careful word may suggest a route, may begin a strand of metaphor or event out of which much, or all, will develop. … A pile of decent work behind him, no matter how small, fuels the writer’s hope, too.”
from “The Writing Life,” 1989 hardback edition, page 15
Of course, she says the opposite one page later, that a writer’s early strokes are useless until the whole arc of the story becomes clear.
For myself I need the hope that a well-crafted paragraph provides, even if it will be discarded once more is revealed.
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 