I have the followup to Crunk basically done. But why it is taking so long to get that final draft in before I submit to my readers (then my editor), before I can publish?
These things haunt writers. I am sure I am not the first. It is not about story-line or character development at this point. Maybe I've read, written and developed the story so much that I am convinced it is done, but I still have to do that final re-write in order to truly convinced.
I do my re-writing different than a lot of people. I've heard that some people go through and add words to already existing sentences. Dean Koontz rewrites a sentence before he moves on with the next one about three or four times. He doesn't go through the story, etc and then rewrite it.
My brain doesn't work that way. I do full rewrites every single time. I just vomit out anything that comes to mind, change the story up about draft 3 or 4 to enhance things or take things about (after the follow-up to Crunk is complete, I will talk about how The Repo Blues short story came about).
Everything is luck of the draw. Especially in the world of arts. There are no coaches, no ability to get better with a boot camp. Most of the writing conventions want to teach you how to write their way, not the way that you find most comfortable. Which is fine, if you want to pay $500-$1000 to hear what works for someone else. I'm not saying that those things don't have merit, but I don't believe that they work for everyone.
I tend to write without touching a keyboard. I was talking to a boring person last night at a hotel bar that I frequent. This was the first time that I had seen him, but he started talking. About himself, as most boring people do. And without any interesting things to say about himself, which is the worst kind of boring. Not only is the subject boring, but the person telling it has no ability to make it sound interested, even to them. I guess it is what you expect to get when you talk to someone who knows they are boring. But I wonder if that guy knows he's the most boring person I've met today. Maybe.
I tend to find interesting things about people. Usually, they hold more significance to me than others. But that is the details of someone's life which are interesting. This fella did not really have a lot of interesting components to him. Even his stories were second-hand. He had spent twenty-seven years at his job which dealt in some capacity with fraud.
I expected to hear some interesting criminal activity. Some characters that he met along the way. It is only after hearing about forty-five minutes of this stuff that I wonder if he wandered through life until retirement, then didn't know what to do with himself. He admitted he sat at a desk, answered the phones, and "managed" people because that what was needed to be done. I cannot imagine never taking an interest in what you are doing beyond merely doing it.
The guy yammered on for about an hour and a half, criticizing the fact that I would rather write on my IPad2 than listen to him. But that got me thinking. Is he so uninteresting that he even bores himself? Now, in a way, that could be funny. I haven't thought of a way to utilize that in a character yet, but it maybe a keeper. Either that or he wasted a good section of night where I could have been writing, creating, because I was too polite to tell him to buzz off.
Thus far, I've covered a lot of things in this blog. I enjoy doing it. The blog doesn't feel like work, plus it gets me going sometimes. When I don't know what I am going to write about concerning a story or something, I just call up the IPad2, start typing in Pages, and crank out a blog post. It sits for a little while until I feel I've given a "post-worthy" segment to the blog. I don't want it to be "hi, I've got nothing today," but thanks for coming by and giving me a few more web hits.
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