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Tuesday, December 07, 2010

The Big Spew

I've been talking with a friend about all the verbal spewing I've been doing on the Work In Progress (WIP). Usually, this includes a lament about what a mess it is and how I'm used to writing clean first drafts. And I am. My revision run after the first draft is done is usually very short.

I'm having a little trouble adjusting to this style of writing. Yesterday, I thought, I've never spewed like this before and I don't like it now. Then I realized this wasn't true.

Thinking back a few years, I remember talking to a different writer friend and using the phrase: barfing on the page. Yeah, not the best visual ever, sorry. Okay, so this means that I used to write this way. I survived it. I'll survive it this time, too.

It's so tough, though, to think about all the work I'm going to have to do when this proposal draft is done. It's going to be time consuming and not even a little bit fun.

There are advantages to this method. For one thing, the writing is faster than my excruciatingly slow, almost ready to go first drafts. Those require a great deal of thinking as I write. The other thing that's nice is that as I'm spewing, I'm learning more about my characters. I always know the hero and heroine well before I start writing, but I still pick up more info as I write in their Points Of View (POV). This spewing has me getting more info, faster. The minus is that most of this will need to be cut because it's not interesting to anyone except me.

As hard as it is for me to think about how messy these scenes and chapters are, I've decided to push forward with this method. One of the best pieces of advice I received after I sold was from a long published author who told me that process will change, sometimes from book to book, and to just go with what works. I'm trying.