Wow, ten months and I feel like I'm finally getting to the story. You know the idea about how the first thing you do when rewriting a story should be to go back to the beginning and delete the first page... I think in my case if I went back and deleted parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 I'd be doing pretty well. But I'm relieved to discover there IS a story waiting to be told, rather than just endless foreplay. Well, I knew there was. For once I had some idea of where I was going and how I was going to get there. I just seemed to have forgotten about it for about thirty pages.
I have a thing for dialogue, I love to write dialogue. And I always feel like I'm indulging it too much. I can go on for pages with just dialogue. So I always feel like I need to be breaking it up with some exposition. I'm not sure whether to be pleased or chagrined seeing that a major issue with the story as it is is that I keep interrupting perfectly reasonable dialogue with ridiculous comments about who shifted which way in what chair.
I was at the library the other day looking for new books to read about writing. I'm very picky about self-help books. I'm chauvinistic. I am biased toward action. I don't really want to read about how to write. I just want to do it. At least, I like to think I want to do it. That's the really chauvinistic part. The point is that I tend to disregard any book that sounds wishy-washy. I don't want to discover my true inner self. I just want to be reminded of what order the basic story elements come in.
I have no problem telling a story when I'm not thinking about it. I sometimes do this at parties. Not at parties where I'm trying to impress anyone, though. My ability to tell a story decreases in proportion to the amount I think about it, to the point that most of the stuff I write has about as much plot energy as a typical hour of C-span. Maybe I do need to discover my inner self. She's probably an accountant.
The Keith Wright story makes a surprising amount of sense for something that came from my keyboard. One thing leads to another (just like in real life!) and things happen that basically make sense. I'm not sure to what I should attribute this. The mermaid thing is also surprisingly coherent, and I attribute that to the fact that it's not the first time I wrote it. The first time I wrote it was when I was doing the exercise of making myself write a story in two pages every night. This put pressure on me to consider such important things as Beginning, Middle, and End. Lawdy. Maybe I should do that again.
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