The Artist's Way
(kind of like a 12-step program to "recover your creativity") suggests writing three pages every day from the top of your head. Brainstorming, stream of consciousness. Pick your euphemism. I have thought of it as "warming up" to write rather than actually writing "The Soul of Atlas." But I need to take this warming up process more seriously. I am doing it to see where it leads. What I need to do is go beyond it. What's next after the warm up? If you warm up, it's for a race. If you don't race, what good is the warm up? Maybe stretching is good, but you know what I mean. So the next step is to pick up my manuscript and read it through, taking notes. What is each chapter missing in terms of flow, and write to fill the gaps. I am afraid of throwing things away, my writing that is, what I have written so far because I am afraid I will need it and want it later, saying "Oh no, I threw that away. Now it's gone!". Of course, I have already printed it out, so I am sure that I could go back and retrieve it somehow. What seems to work is this, and I will plan for it: Go through the manuscript with all of my changes (not throwing anything away). When I have gone through (and I should highlight anything that is in doubt, or suspicious, so that I will trim everything down). Then after I have gone through, made changes to the text (from my hard-copy notes), and highlighted all of the text that I am tempted to throw out, I can go back and see where, if anywhere, these highlighted portions might fit. If nowhere, be ruthless. Maybe Ruth can help me with that. I can see the crack of light at the end, and I am excited about the prospect.
1 comments:
Two things that helped me TONS on the treatise.
(1) I realized that the second I woke up, if I would just lie there for a minute (and sometimes this happened during insomnia), my brain would kind of do its own thing with my book and make criticisms and suggestions, and remind me of things i'd left out, and things that should be moved around, etc. So some of these ideas were so great that I started keeping a notebook next to my bed and during insomnia and just after wake up i would scribble as fast as i could to catch all these thoughts and ideas. Not sure your brain works this way, but it was like being rescued, for me.
(2) I had two people of different age groups (vastly different approaches) go through the first 50 pages (they each had their own copy) and scribble anything that popped into their head as they read the text. I found so many things to clarify that way, AND was able to pick up a pattern from their responses to the first 50 pages, that I carried thru the book and could edit sort of "through their eyes" for the remainder of the text, even tho they werent actually helping me after page 50.
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