author’s note, happy new year January 1, 2007
Posted by jeanne in Author's Note, Characters, construction news, Creative Writing, original fiction.add a comment
well, it’s been months since i’ve done a lick of work writing fiction.
however, i’ve been faithfully cataloging the construction process on this multimillion, multistoreyed commercial / condo building that looms above our neighborhood.
you can see it for blocks, as we walk the dog. it’s visible from the cotton mill, it’s visible from boulevard and memorial, a major currently rundown intersection with loads of potential.
every day, we give thanks that we live in such a quickly changing part of atlanta, because we never get bored, and it’s always fascinating to see new stuff going up. i love a mix. it’s so cool towatch this thoroughly modern construction of steel and cinderbock towering above the one and two storey houses built at the turn of the last century at the edge of grant park. if it weren’t for trees in peoples’ back yards, it would loom.
as it is, with no leaves on the trees, and with them beginning to build back toward us (now that the crane has been moved and they can complete the things they couldn’t before because of the crane’s swing radius), it’s going to take the full summer extent of leafiness to begin to shield us from the huge enormous 7 floors of wall two houses wide in our back yard.
on th other hand, i haven’t had much to do with the fiction writing part of this online novel. i had one after another friend and houseguest in town all during october and november, and then it was the runup to xmas and all those presents i spent two months making down in the studio, and now i’ve got next year’s garden to ready as fast as i can (the wildflower seed is in the fridge while i finish pulling existing plants out of the new field (formerly gravel driveway).
i keep coming back to my story with ideas and revisions. the story with star is gong to be so much more fascinating becauwe of twists and turns in the characters on whom these characters are based. i’m keeping notes on everything, and a closely watched teenagerhood rewards you with many anecdotes and a divine sense of seriousness and crisis, a doom hovering about waiting to crash down.
but like many other things in life, i find i’m stalling about getting back to work. i just can’t seem to finish chapter 4. there are so many things still to be woven in, and i’m getting bored with it, which means it needs to be chopped all to pieces and half of it thrown out. so maybe i’ll tackle that in a little while.
i haven’t forgotten about it, even tho i haven’t looked at the chapter for a month or two. it’s been simmering in my mind, and i’ve been letting it take the back burner.
jeanne
This idea I had for chapter structure October 6, 2006
Posted by jeanne in Author's Note, Blog project, construction news, Creative Writing, original fiction, synopsis.1 comment so far
I had started out with 27 chapters, and paled at the thought. So I revised my outline until I had 12 chapters, and felt proud of myself.
I waas aware that each chapter might expand outward a little to encompass all I had to get said. However, it’s been months since I’ve posted a chapter, and I’m getting very tired of still working thru chapter four, six to eight hours a day. Okay, two to eight. Two to six
I think I need to go back to smaller chapters, because the amount of work involved just flling in the outline is staggering. Weeks of elaborating and weeks more to go before you can look at the written out mass of ideas and things that have to happen. and when you do, it doesn’t flow together and it’s stilted and obvious, self conscious and hiding.
If I were writing shorter chapters, this process would be reduced to about a week. About a week’s work writing, editing and polishing about 15 pages. I’m sitting here, finally having filled in all the gaps, and with all that polishing and editing still to be done, and looking at 50 pages of the same dense prose. I feel like the stuck writer in Wonderboys.
So since I find I have to break up the chapter as I have written it, because its too damn ed long I might as well go back to shorter chapters. I’ll decide later and post any revisions.
I’m not going to be posting much in the next few weeks. I’ve got houseguests, and I still have to finish the current chapter, and won’t have time. So please be happy with the daily report on the construction process. Soon I intend to illustrate these construction posts with photos.
Release the chapter within September 15, 2006
Posted by jeanne in Author's Note, Blog project, construction news, Creative Writing, Editing, original fiction, Plotting.add a comment
i’ve been working on chapter four for absolute years. first i had to go and rework the plot structure, cutting the number of chapters in half. unfortunately, this just resulted in bigger chapters. like self- medicating with bigger puffs from those awful slim cigarettes.
i went my usual course, which is to dilly around writing snippets and scenelets at will. i eventually got to the end of that, and went back to find i had no concept of the flow of the text. it was random.
i wrote the vibro crane stuff twice. once lots better than the other. the writing took weeks. some days i was overwhelmed. onwe whole week i had other commitmemts. it took forever.
when i got done, i took the mess and printed it out, labelled each paragraph or two, then turned over the top sheet of paper and listed the labels in three colums that completely filled the paper, in a small, determined little hand. then i got out the colored pencils. then i drew lines and arrows. then i scratched out and rewote stuff somewhere else. and thought, and saw no way to eliminate. when i was done i wrote it all back out in its new order, on another page, and this time it took up half the page, but only because i was writing letters too small to see with these old eyes.
so i have a rearranged chapter four, and now i can go back and hopefully cut a lot of it, tho i don’t hold out much hope. it’ll be another while before it’s ready to publish on the blog, but until then i’ll keep putting up construction updates
Construction News 