I'm tired, I'll say that. This story has been exhilarating and exhausting. Oh, it'll need major rewriting. I've developed this habit over the course of the last month of closing my eyes and letting my fingers fly without letting me know what they're typing. So, quite honestly, much of what's happened this month is largely unknown to me. I know for a fact though, that it's terrible. Terrible writing. Generic verbs. Adjectives galore. Whiny characters. Oh, heaven help us! In the words of Anne Lamott:
"The whole thing would be so long and incoherent and hideous that for the rest of the day I'd obsess about getting creamed by a car before I could write a decent second draft. I'd worry that people would read what I'd written and believe the accident had really been a suicide, that I had panicked because my talent was waning and my mind was shot."I'll fix it though. All bestselling novels began like this. Climax is drawing near. Soon. Soon.
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| Don't be silly. I have a plot. I just need to figure out how to execute it in an inspiring way. A way that does justice to the real story. That's my problem... |
I want to put a couple quotes about writing on here, to inspire those of you who are like me and are putting everything in them toward that finish line.
"What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy." --Salman Rushdie
"The goal, I suppose, any fiction writer has, no matter what your subject, is to hit the human heart and the tear ducts and the nape of the neck and to make a person feel something about what the characters are going through and to experience the moral paradoxes and struggles of being human." --Tim O'Brien
"For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed." --Ernest Hemingway
"I am not a consecutive writer." --Dr. Seuss
"As a writer, one of the things I've always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that's what we're supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react." --Stephen King
"The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all, there is nobody to scold him." --Roald Dahl
"A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer." --Karl Kraus
"A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch. --Michael Ondaatje
"A writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location." --Flannery O'Connor
"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom." --Roald Dahl
"Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him." --Mel Brooks
"All the writing elements are the same. You need to tell a good story... You've got good characters... People think there's some dramatic difference between writing 'Little Bear' and the 'Hunger Games,' and as a writer, for me, there isn't." --Suzanne Collins
"I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, and that enables you to laugh at life's realities." --Dr. Seuss
"To be a dramatic writer takes hard work, talent, and discipline. And that's why I just make up crap." --Colin Mochrie
"You can mope and cry all you want, but it won't help you write a better novel." --Gilbert Blythe
Come on! Let's do this thing! We can do it.
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