Modem Noise

« Little Known Author in Wretched Post-Book Season of Glums | Main | What Is This I See Before Me? »

March 22, 2006

Inspiring Story of True Writerly Grit

Today I got Jeanne Cavelos' annual newsletter in amongst the day's email. I was reading along, finding it all very interesting indeed--but then I got to this passage, which made me sit up and take serious notice:

Many people have been asking when they are ever going to be able to read my next novel, FATAL SPIRAL. In the last issue of the newsletter, which came out over a year ago, I reported that I was about six months away from finishing a draft. After throwing out everything four times, I thought I was finally on the right track.

Since then, I have thrown away everything two more times. Characters have been killed, plotlines slashed, scenes re-imagined. I threw out my 80-page outline and wrote a new, 3-page outline. I've thrown away approximately 1200 pages of manuscript at this point--an entire trilogy worth of text!

I started my most recent draft on February 1, and am now up to p. 170. This is probably about one-third of the book. It is so much better than the previous versions, I feel really good about throwing all those pages away. Each draft has taught me something valuable about the story I'm trying to tell. I wish I could have gotten to this point faster and more efficiently, but unfortunately, writing doesn't always work like that. Sometimes it happens quickly--you're struck by a bolt of inspiration that lays the whole story out in front of you in perfect clarity, and your fingers can barely type fast enough to get it down. Sometimes it happens slowly, a compelling idea or mysterious figure drawing you into a maze, your fingers, with each stumbling word, revealing a bit more of the maze, a dead end, a wrong turn, until at last you find your way to the center and discover what the story is all about, so you can go back to the beginning and follow the right path.

I immediately flashed back to the Epic and Very Bitter Struggle I went through with my )(&*^%##@*) ANTIMATTER VOODOO project, with all the failures (having to junk 82,000 words of MS, etc) and the dud rewrites and ultimately even suspecting I'd lost my authorly mojo, etc. Ms Cavelos here has been there, done that, and in fact had it so much worse than I did, and still she persevered, and is now getting her problem novel sorted out.

Now that's a damned inspiring story! I am so impressed. Even, dare I say, thinking maybe about taking AV for another spin, see where it might go.

Wow!

PS: feeling quite a bit better. I think dumping all my worries into the blog post yesterday seems to have helped.

Posted by adrian at March 22, 2006 06:38 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.kabedford.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/38

Comments

Post a comment