![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Progress, only on the wrong story!
Aug. 14th, 2008 05:18 pmI've been kind of flying at the speed of light with this story. I'm getting close to 25,000 words and have only been working on it for a couple of weeks.
So where did the Tower!Guy story go? It's taking a breather. I pushed back my deadline for it, because I have the time to do that, and because I was getting nowhere with it. I'm coming back to it, but I seriously did need to do this. Because right now, I'm learning more from this story than I have from anything else in a long time.
Project: The Wolfshorde (tentative title)
Wordcount: 21,942
Goal:75,000-90,000 words
Deadline: October 1st
Reason For Stopping:Dinner doesn't make itself
Exercise:Walking on errands. Usual walk/jog at 6am was canceled because of imminent rain.
Stimulants/Chemicals: None
Musical Inspiration: Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog; Kings of Convenience - Homesick; Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Down Boy; The Ting Tings - That's Not My Name; Bear McCreary - All Along The Watch Tower (from Battlestar Galactica).
Other Creative Activities - Journaling, organizing things.
Reading Materials - Queen Isabella - Alison Weir. Still waiting for my amazon shipment.
Darling du Jour: The Wolf watched Dylan strip off his shirt, in full view. Lean muscles worked under skin scarred with old cigarette burns from childhood that hadn't healed right.
Mean Things: Kidnapping; abusive childhoods; surprise! you're adopted!; houses being burned down; death threats
Things Learned/Discovered: How to economize each sentence; Readers are not like dogs, you can let them off-leash; It's okay to trust your readers to make small logical inferences from time to time.
Let me explain that last bit. Let's say I start out with a scene like this:
Lisa stomped into his office, she was furious because he had taken away the funds her department needed. Those funds were necessary to keeping everything running.
She came in with a slam of the door.
"Ted!" she yelled angrily, absolutely determined to give him a piece of her mind for cutting off the department's funds. "You're nothing but a cheap, useless pencil pusher!"
Ted clenched his jaw and stared at her. He was furious because she'd come stomping in and insulted him without even saying so much as hello. (wordcount: 89)
If I trust my reader to have even a minimal amount of savvy, I can economize my words and come out with this:
Lisa was furious that Ted had taken away the funds her department needed to operate.
Lisa stomped into Ted's office and slammed the door. "Ted, you're nothing but a cheap, useless pencil pusher!"
Ted clenched his jaw and stared at her. (wordcount: 41)
I can trust the reader to know why Ted is staring at Lisa and clenching his jaw, and I can also do without having to add "she yelled, angrily" to the dialog. Because we have a pretty good idea why Lisa is angry. She losing money. That and the exclamation point make it obvious to all observers that she's raising her voice to him.
This is to say nothing of the fact that the first two sentences were a waste of space respectively.
I know this is going to come as no great revelation to most of the people on my f-list who are consummate writers and probably figured this out ages ago. But for me, it's important. Because I've been doing this sort of thing all the time. It's why my wordcounts go so high, so fast.
It's why I need to write this story before I can go back to the Tower!Guy story. Right now, I have to go back and revise my writing to tighten it. Hopefully, I can start training myself to write this way from the get-go, thus making the editing process infinitely less painful.
So where did the Tower!Guy story go? It's taking a breather. I pushed back my deadline for it, because I have the time to do that, and because I was getting nowhere with it. I'm coming back to it, but I seriously did need to do this. Because right now, I'm learning more from this story than I have from anything else in a long time.
Project: The Wolfshorde (tentative title)
Wordcount: 21,942
Goal:75,000-90,000 words
Deadline: October 1st
Reason For Stopping:Dinner doesn't make itself
Exercise:Walking on errands. Usual walk/jog at 6am was canceled because of imminent rain.
Stimulants/Chemicals: None
Musical Inspiration: Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog; Kings of Convenience - Homesick; Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Down Boy; The Ting Tings - That's Not My Name; Bear McCreary - All Along The Watch Tower (from Battlestar Galactica).
Other Creative Activities - Journaling, organizing things.
Reading Materials - Queen Isabella - Alison Weir. Still waiting for my amazon shipment.
Darling du Jour: The Wolf watched Dylan strip off his shirt, in full view. Lean muscles worked under skin scarred with old cigarette burns from childhood that hadn't healed right.
Mean Things: Kidnapping; abusive childhoods; surprise! you're adopted!; houses being burned down; death threats
Things Learned/Discovered: How to economize each sentence; Readers are not like dogs, you can let them off-leash; It's okay to trust your readers to make small logical inferences from time to time.
Let me explain that last bit. Let's say I start out with a scene like this:
Lisa stomped into his office, she was furious because he had taken away the funds her department needed. Those funds were necessary to keeping everything running.
She came in with a slam of the door.
"Ted!" she yelled angrily, absolutely determined to give him a piece of her mind for cutting off the department's funds. "You're nothing but a cheap, useless pencil pusher!"
Ted clenched his jaw and stared at her. He was furious because she'd come stomping in and insulted him without even saying so much as hello. (wordcount: 89)
If I trust my reader to have even a minimal amount of savvy, I can economize my words and come out with this:
Lisa was furious that Ted had taken away the funds her department needed to operate.
Lisa stomped into Ted's office and slammed the door. "Ted, you're nothing but a cheap, useless pencil pusher!"
Ted clenched his jaw and stared at her. (wordcount: 41)
I can trust the reader to know why Ted is staring at Lisa and clenching his jaw, and I can also do without having to add "she yelled, angrily" to the dialog. Because we have a pretty good idea why Lisa is angry. She losing money. That and the exclamation point make it obvious to all observers that she's raising her voice to him.
This is to say nothing of the fact that the first two sentences were a waste of space respectively.
I know this is going to come as no great revelation to most of the people on my f-list who are consummate writers and probably figured this out ages ago. But for me, it's important. Because I've been doing this sort of thing all the time. It's why my wordcounts go so high, so fast.
It's why I need to write this story before I can go back to the Tower!Guy story. Right now, I have to go back and revise my writing to tighten it. Hopefully, I can start training myself to write this way from the get-go, thus making the editing process infinitely less painful.
