WOWZA!
Wow, what a ride!
Over the course of the last few months I've been furiously working on my humorous memoir, 'TTITC' and I'm happy, no, exhilarated to say, "It. Is. Finished." I wrote the last word two days ago and I still can't breathe. Though to tell you the truth, I didn't think I would feel so sad over it at the same time. I'm happy and ecstatic, true, but those emotions are tinged with a feeling of sadness. Perhaps this is a natural reaction in saying farewell to a book that I've nurtured and coddled over the last six or seven years. One that I've cried and laughed over, hated and loved, treated carefully and ignored for months on end, but in the end, one that I always came back to. Working day and night, many a night burning the midnight oil over and not truly knowing if I'd ever finish or not. I don't really know, beings it's the first full-length novel I've completed and one that is so intensely and personally connected to me. And so I wonder, is this a normal reaction?
It seems to me like it's taken a very long time to finish and I think part of it was my fear of finishing it. I think I became complacent with it, because I wanted to have something to love and not love at the same time, and it gave me something to feel excited over and yet complain about every day, but it also gave me motivation knowing I wouldn't be happy if I didn't finish it. Perhaps I'm feeling sad over writing the last word because I have to find a way to let go of my child? Because that's what the books and stories I write are, children. I've loved and nurtured my stories just like I've done for my human children, and it took years to get them (my human children) to a place of independence so I'm guessing it might be the same for a book or story that I've created and bore from my creative pool!
So now I find I must figure out how to let it go and move on to the next chapter (pun intended) of my writing life which is already in progress with a horror fiction I've been working on. I've been looking forward to getting back to those friends of mine who have been patiently waiting for me while I finished the memoir, and now with 'TTITC' finally finished I can turn my full and undivided attention back to them and their lives! I look forward to getting reacquainted with the friends I have there, and I hope they are willing to move forward with me once again. That is to say, I hope I have the chops to change gears and move from the memoir into the fiction and do it well. I'm pretty certain it's going to be a painless transition, I just need to do some heavy reviewing and get my mind back to that temperament and I can't wait to see how the horror fiction turns out!
In the 'between' times, I've been working to tighten-up short stories I've written over the years with the intention of entering them for competitions, and that's been quite the ride too. Other than working towards the end of the memoir and seeing it to the finish line, tightening up my short stories has been one of the hardest things I think I've had to do yet and I'll tell you why . . .
For a competition I'm considering, I choose one of my dramatic fiction shorts called, 'A Party In Autumn', which everyone who's read it, loved. Originally when I wrote it, the story stood at forty-nine-hundred words which technically doesn't even qualify as a short story since most shorts are a maximum of three-thousand words, and I find that for a competition, the three-thousand word limit stands. I definitely had my work cut out for me! So, having an affinity for this particular story myself I sat down and really tore it apart, and boy did I bleed!
I deconstructed the entire story, word by word, eliminating all the obvious and unnecessary words like: like, that, just, and very and I was still way over the word count. Forty-eight hundred and seventy-five words to be exact. Which was good and not good at the same time. It meant that I didn't include a lot of superfluous words in the narrative, but I still had to find a way to cut almost forty-nine hundred words, and so I continued to hack at the story. I thought long and hard about the story and I had to realize what the story was and what it wasn't about, and whom the story was about, and whom it wasn't, and I continued to cut text from the narrative. That got me down to forty-one hundred words which left me with eleven-hundred words to cut. I started to sweat. I didn't think I was going to be able to cut that much more out of the narrative and still have a great story.
It was at this point I realized I better start reconstructing the narrative or else I was going to end up with a convoluted version of the original and I wanted to keep the same emotional temperament and pace. I kept my goal in mind as I continued to look for extraneous text that I could cut from the body and I will say, some parts were damned hard to cut out because I liked their inclusion, but I found it necessary for them to go and after reading it through once more, I realized I was better off without those favorite lines. Having done all that, I was left with six-hundred and fifty words to cut yet, so I read and reread the narrative over and over again, each pass through finding a different way to say this or that and when I reworked the story for the seventh time, I was left with only ninety-nine words to go. Believing there was nothing more to cut, and sweating profusely while thinking about the narrative over the course of two days, I went back to the beginning.
This is where things got hairy. I had worked and reworked the story, over and over again, rearranging sentence structures, finding different alternatives to say the same things that used less words, but keeping the emotional impact, and may I just plug for a moment here, God bless the 'Word Count' feature! I used it continuously when I got down to the ninety-nine words. So, I was loving the way the story felt and it read like the original, but I still had ninety-nine words to cut. Another pass through with a fine tooth comb was necessary here. I literally gouged out the next ninety-nine words, making certain syntax, sentence structure, flow, pace and temperament were all still in tact while finding a way to cut the word 'is' from here and using a comma instead of 'and' there, and you know what? After all of that, after all the work was done and the sweat had dried, I was left with a clean-as-a-whistle narrative that I'm damned proud to put my name on which stands at exactly three-thousand words, including the title!
I had some of the readers who read the original story read the heavily edited version and guess what? They still loved it! I'm a happy girl.
And I have to say, "Wowza, What a ride!" Do writer's bleed over what they right? You bet your ass we do. I bled. Everywhere. I will tell you, it was damned hard to do and I don't regret a single second of it! Now that's a story I wanted to share with you because someone else may be contemplating doing the same thing and I want to help those who haven't experienced that kind of writing yet, and because of course and as always, I'm Just Me . . .
Over the course of the last few months I've been furiously working on my humorous memoir, 'TTITC' and I'm happy, no, exhilarated to say, "It. Is. Finished." I wrote the last word two days ago and I still can't breathe. Though to tell you the truth, I didn't think I would feel so sad over it at the same time. I'm happy and ecstatic, true, but those emotions are tinged with a feeling of sadness. Perhaps this is a natural reaction in saying farewell to a book that I've nurtured and coddled over the last six or seven years. One that I've cried and laughed over, hated and loved, treated carefully and ignored for months on end, but in the end, one that I always came back to. Working day and night, many a night burning the midnight oil over and not truly knowing if I'd ever finish or not. I don't really know, beings it's the first full-length novel I've completed and one that is so intensely and personally connected to me. And so I wonder, is this a normal reaction?
It seems to me like it's taken a very long time to finish and I think part of it was my fear of finishing it. I think I became complacent with it, because I wanted to have something to love and not love at the same time, and it gave me something to feel excited over and yet complain about every day, but it also gave me motivation knowing I wouldn't be happy if I didn't finish it. Perhaps I'm feeling sad over writing the last word because I have to find a way to let go of my child? Because that's what the books and stories I write are, children. I've loved and nurtured my stories just like I've done for my human children, and it took years to get them (my human children) to a place of independence so I'm guessing it might be the same for a book or story that I've created and bore from my creative pool!
So now I find I must figure out how to let it go and move on to the next chapter (pun intended) of my writing life which is already in progress with a horror fiction I've been working on. I've been looking forward to getting back to those friends of mine who have been patiently waiting for me while I finished the memoir, and now with 'TTITC' finally finished I can turn my full and undivided attention back to them and their lives! I look forward to getting reacquainted with the friends I have there, and I hope they are willing to move forward with me once again. That is to say, I hope I have the chops to change gears and move from the memoir into the fiction and do it well. I'm pretty certain it's going to be a painless transition, I just need to do some heavy reviewing and get my mind back to that temperament and I can't wait to see how the horror fiction turns out!
In the 'between' times, I've been working to tighten-up short stories I've written over the years with the intention of entering them for competitions, and that's been quite the ride too. Other than working towards the end of the memoir and seeing it to the finish line, tightening up my short stories has been one of the hardest things I think I've had to do yet and I'll tell you why . . .
For a competition I'm considering, I choose one of my dramatic fiction shorts called, 'A Party In Autumn', which everyone who's read it, loved. Originally when I wrote it, the story stood at forty-nine-hundred words which technically doesn't even qualify as a short story since most shorts are a maximum of three-thousand words, and I find that for a competition, the three-thousand word limit stands. I definitely had my work cut out for me! So, having an affinity for this particular story myself I sat down and really tore it apart, and boy did I bleed!
I deconstructed the entire story, word by word, eliminating all the obvious and unnecessary words like: like, that, just, and very and I was still way over the word count. Forty-eight hundred and seventy-five words to be exact. Which was good and not good at the same time. It meant that I didn't include a lot of superfluous words in the narrative, but I still had to find a way to cut almost forty-nine hundred words, and so I continued to hack at the story. I thought long and hard about the story and I had to realize what the story was and what it wasn't about, and whom the story was about, and whom it wasn't, and I continued to cut text from the narrative. That got me down to forty-one hundred words which left me with eleven-hundred words to cut. I started to sweat. I didn't think I was going to be able to cut that much more out of the narrative and still have a great story.
It was at this point I realized I better start reconstructing the narrative or else I was going to end up with a convoluted version of the original and I wanted to keep the same emotional temperament and pace. I kept my goal in mind as I continued to look for extraneous text that I could cut from the body and I will say, some parts were damned hard to cut out because I liked their inclusion, but I found it necessary for them to go and after reading it through once more, I realized I was better off without those favorite lines. Having done all that, I was left with six-hundred and fifty words to cut yet, so I read and reread the narrative over and over again, each pass through finding a different way to say this or that and when I reworked the story for the seventh time, I was left with only ninety-nine words to go. Believing there was nothing more to cut, and sweating profusely while thinking about the narrative over the course of two days, I went back to the beginning.
This is where things got hairy. I had worked and reworked the story, over and over again, rearranging sentence structures, finding different alternatives to say the same things that used less words, but keeping the emotional impact, and may I just plug for a moment here, God bless the 'Word Count' feature! I used it continuously when I got down to the ninety-nine words. So, I was loving the way the story felt and it read like the original, but I still had ninety-nine words to cut. Another pass through with a fine tooth comb was necessary here. I literally gouged out the next ninety-nine words, making certain syntax, sentence structure, flow, pace and temperament were all still in tact while finding a way to cut the word 'is' from here and using a comma instead of 'and' there, and you know what? After all of that, after all the work was done and the sweat had dried, I was left with a clean-as-a-whistle narrative that I'm damned proud to put my name on which stands at exactly three-thousand words, including the title!
I had some of the readers who read the original story read the heavily edited version and guess what? They still loved it! I'm a happy girl.
And I have to say, "Wowza, What a ride!" Do writer's bleed over what they right? You bet your ass we do. I bled. Everywhere. I will tell you, it was damned hard to do and I don't regret a single second of it! Now that's a story I wanted to share with you because someone else may be contemplating doing the same thing and I want to help those who haven't experienced that kind of writing yet, and because of course and as always, I'm Just Me . . .
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