LOG:2:3:1/2:2:3 Easy Does It

Happy with my final draft (5, i think) about the Theatre and Mrs. W. At first it started off with the sentence "he was almost too late", in order to imbue it with an immediate tension and action, and introduced a character going to the theatre. In the end I replaced "he" with "she" and made the whole thing about Mrs. W. It flowed better as a result.

I also tried to keep the paragraphs short in order to create suspense, a bang-bang, pow structure, and there was a good amount of action throughout - from going to the theatre, to rooting around in the office, etc.

I also created another draft about old Mr. Soe at a Kirk, in a morning rather than over three days, and it was satisfactory. In the course book it asks "do you see a story emerging" and the answer is yes, and its not just isolated to the individual drafts, but runs through them all so that I can pin them up on the wall side by side and draw correspondences between them.

I'm developing a set of tools; listing, drafting, editing, redrafting and merging, cutting out tired words and phrases while trying not to overburden the writing with too many descriptions, or with descriptions for descriptions sake.

What I havn't done with the theatre draft yet is hunt down those tired words, but I think there are less from the attention I paid to it and from the amount of times I redrafted it.

The biggest difference between the pieces I'm writing now and the pieces I wrote for the last part of the course is that I've simplified everything, so its clear that Mrs. W. is in a theatre, that she's in charge of the ticket booth, and that she's late. Before I had a character who was simultaneously a vampire, sociopath and businessman, doing so many different things for so many different reasons that it was incoherent. This was because I had a lot of ideas that I wanted to fit into one piece, and since then I've tried to fit not the ideas but the feel of these ideas into the pieces, so that when they occur they will fit in. Thus the theatre is out of place because eventually the protagonist will be revealed to be out of place etc. I used terms that conjured military images like "entrenched", "bulldog", etc to describe a character that has been weathered/blooded, so that when it transpires that he's a retired soldier it will fit, and that revelation won't be necessary for a while because he already has that sentiment as part of his character.

This use of moods and descriptive words is something I can develop a lot more. One of the problems with the Chinese Theatre draft was that in one paragraph I described Mrs. W. like she was a mummified corpse, and in the next I described her like she was fresh food - both appropriate images for the character, but inappropriate when used together. I carried a theme through well, i think, in describing her office like a submarine, and her searching arms extending like perescopes. It wouldn't have worked to well to describe her office as a submarine (machine image) and her arms as those of an octopus (animal image) even though both images belong to the sea.

Writing is a lot like cooking a meal - you've got to balance the raw ingredients with the right spices, cook them in the right way, for the right time, and serve them in adequate portions.

Of the three most recent drafts, one aptly describes a characters history and motivation, and two aptly describe characters in relation to setting. It seems like it will be a very difficult thing to put setting, character, motivation and history into 1000 words.

The next hair pulling brain teaser awaits........