Saturday, February 19, 2012

I've been trying really, really hard to start turning out first drafts of the next story I'm writing. Thus far, at least for me, this has been the most difficult part--generating totally new material. I'm much better at revising. And last week, when I was workshopped, I realized how much work I still have to do on the first story and how good it could be if I did do that. No matter how hard I try to turn out a proper, finished first draft of the second story, I'm inexplicably drawn to the first--thinking about it, making notes about it, reading old drafts just because I can.

When I read the packet in the first week of Shelly's class about process (and again, I seem to be answering the same question) there was one particular author who felt that you could never work on more than one piece of writing at the same time, or else he gets distracted and feels that he is doing neither justice. Although I've usually been able to work on a lot of things at the same time, but this time it doesn't quite feel organic. When I rewrite Interior Space, I have to honestly rewrite it, from the very skeleton (which I have all recorded, unfortunately on paper) which seems just as important as making a first draft of a new story. And it's going to be so different--I feel like I'm convincing myself to do something I'm uncomfortable with, quitting on the second story for a little while, but I can never quite get myself to really work, to really, honestly, sit down and do something productive, on the second story. I have notes and little bits lying around, but that's more out of habit than real passion.

I don't have class this week, as it happens, so I think I'm going to take it a little more slowly on the workshopping of my peers and the rest of that work. It's good to take a week off, I think--it's a really rough class. And I have another writing assignment that I have to complete--the vision assignment, which I will journal about when I actually do it--so I've got no shortage of things to do. And also school, for a change, started to kick in, so I'm really learning to balance all of this stuff (although right now I'm on a luxurious four day weekend). It's nice to have a lot of things to do and the time to do them.