I’ve eaten the sun so my tongue has been burned of the taste…
So, I noticed quite a few folks this month tried to meet the goal for National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). I’ll admit that this year I didn’t even try. Way to much RL going on. I also have two major problems when it comes to writing. One, I hate re-writes; my words are my babies. Two, I can’t help telling the stories orally, I’m a talker, and once it’s told I have no oomph to write it. Neil Gaiman provides some words of wisdom for solving problem number one. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do about two.
- Finish it.
- Put it away. Drawers are good. Don’t look at it for a week or so.
- Read the whole thing, doing my best to pretend that I’ve never read it before.
- Fix the big things. (These tend to be things that pop out at you when you read it, like noticing that you’ve led up to the prison escape, and then meeting the prisoners after they’ve escaped, and realising that it might really have been a good idea to write the escape. Or that the first chapter would really work better as chapter 5.)
- Read it through page by page and fix the line by line things. Notice that Omar mysteriously becomes Mustapha on page 50 and stays Mustapha until page 90 when he becomes Mustafa. Pick one and make it consistent. Wonder whether anyone will notice that you’ve put Paris in Belgium. Decide to leave it there, on the basis that no-one will notice.
- Get up in the middle of the night and move Paris back to France.
I gotta say, the man makes sense. Thanks, Keith, for pointing it out.