It's amazing what writing every day will do for you. Yestereve I realized I was getting darn close to the end of a first draft of my current project, "The Elf of Cotton Street", and that inspired me to spend more time than usual. Today at lunch I reached the last scene.
I feel good. It's a pretty rough draft, with lots of telling and meandering, but it's good work. It's a complete rewrite of the original, and a lot more happens. I feel like I know the characters and the setting very well and I did a ton of work on the background that is bearing fruit now.
I did most of this in a notebook in longhand. The majority of this draft is about 50 pages of handwritten text, double-spaced. Usually I'll take that and type it up mostly as is, then edit that. But I'm thinking that I'll try to only type up the good stuff, because I'm so conscious of the fact that lots of this needs to be edited away, and the pure typing takes forever and seems like a giant waste of time.
Congratulations! Wow, I'm surprised so much was done in longhand. Do you think better with paper than with laptop?
ReplyDeleteI dunno. Notebooks are awfully convenient...no boot time, super compact, and it's easy to see how much progress you're making. I'd say over the past three years I've done most of my raw-content generation in longhand.
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