Sitting in the middle, I could swiftly swivel about to check the effects of simultaneity ("patterned repetition and variation on key phrases, key images, and parallel elements" - page 241 of Madden's Revising Fiction), and how well I was consistently treating the narrative's interests and its specific settings/characters/plots/themes to ensure they all received full and balanced treatment in each section. Each page I found wanting (which was every page of course) I pulled to the center for edits and markup on the notebook then cast it back into the spiral. There was one point that I realized an element I mentioned at the end had been mistakenly removed from the beginning, so I took those pages out of an earlier draft I had saved and slid it in beside the page I decided it should follow. I then proceeded to cut 75% of it (as most of it was horrendous).
Anyway, time to take my morning writing session to finalize the next draft and then do this all again. Must hurry and polish this story enough to submit it to one of the four submissions with end-of-March deadlines. Probably Writers of the Future or phantom drift for this one. Depends on how well the other stories progress in their final stages.
Good luck in your own writings or other creative endeavors! More posts on interesting approaches to writing and managing time are forthcoming.
No comments:
Post a Comment