A four day holiday weekend means four days of writing. I breathe again.
Hope for good things on this break, and some sleep.
Month: August 2006
Silly Season
Next Saturday is an all hands on deck workday; the students land in force. The plan till then: write as much as possible whenever not at work. Beyond that point the odds of a normal workday are unlikely until October.
About thirty pages of serious lifting remain. From there, light edits and a complete ending rewrite.
A quirk — and it’s a good one — about the this stage of the edit process is that for every page cut, a new passage takes its place. Where it comes from, I’m never sure. Many times I’m unaware as the excise, revise, rewrite cycle plays out. I just whack the weakest scene, write a better version, and at the end of the session — somehow, magic maybe — the word count falls at roughly the same mark.
Callbacks
On average for every two phone messages I leave, one person returns the call. That number includes business matters. If work related messages are excluded, the ratio plummets to three messages per callback. Boy, what a harsh view on the state of my communication skills.
Sometimes the odds are better, sometimes slightly worse, but over time those are the metrics. Looking at my own call history, I want to believe I am more responsive. I might be. But I drink from the same well.
And there are reasons to not return a call. Valid, rational explanations. For instance, the caller on the message is drunk; it’s 3AM; it’s the last person in the world I want to deal with; I was gone for the weekend and the spontaneous invitation no longer applies because the date passed.
Also, by their nature some messages do not require a reply, so I understand when someone does not. A friend that drives a long way home from dinner just wants to let you know they arrived safely. In that case, their message closes the loop. They need no further reassurance.
Over the next week, I will be more aware of when I avoid calling people back, and why.
Collaboration II
Had an interesting phone call with a friend in the Great White North about writing in general, and the art of story telling in great detail. Turns out our styles are similar enough that we admire the other’s work, and can probably write together, and in a way that meshes both of our strengths, without producing something that reads like a Round Robin free for all. And yes, I have mentioned this before on the site.
At the same time, we approach the craft, character development and dialog very differently. I imagine this writer takes lots of notes about characters, settings and back story before starting. My habit is to map high level plot points, and do a very brief scene outline, i.e. hero finds body in a bathroom, note in killer’s hand on mirror mentions hero by name. I might spend a lot of time on the ramp up process, taking ten thousand feet snapshots. Or not. In the end, though, I let the characters reveal themselves through their actions, revise the outline on the fly with respect to plot, and avoid a commitment to character specifics until they demand to be colored in.
But the bottom line is that a natural synergy between us very possibly awaits. If we let it.
The question: will a project happen. Possibly. I hope definitely. However, he’s marrying this fall, and starting on his novel. I have mine to finish and sell.
Basically I’m at a loss as to how to get to the next step, but open to suggestions. My instinct says whip up a rough synopsis and outline for a story idea we discussed, hand it off and see where it leads. Second idea: write the first scene, planning be damned. The freedom of that approach might be so different from our usual model, it will spark the initial interest and get the project off the ground.
Thoughts?