Writers write words. And count them, and edit them, and change them, and polish them.
Words contain ideas. Words contain emotions.
Department of the Sky is Blue, I know: but these are the things I am pondering today. I used to be a faster writer, when all I had in my head were ideas and emotions–huge, glistening, ripe fat ideas that were screaming to be put on the page, and deep, torturous emotions that I simply HAD to share with the world, because nobody could possibly feel the pain that I felt. And out they poured, those ideas and emotions, taking the form of every cliche I’d ever heard. Stupid words.
Like shorthand, or training wheels, or something.
I am still convinced that we all have a whole bunch of bad writing jamming up our creative pipelines, and we have to get all that bad writing out of the way before the good stuff can come out; but it’s also a process of development. And practice. And learning. And thinking.
I write more slowly now. I think more, I choose the actual words I write, rather than being lost up at the meta-level of the story or down at the micro-level of the emotion and blathering on with unimaginative prose.
Sure, I still overuse words. I used “particular” so many times today, I almost decided to go back and do something stylistic with it. As though I had done it on purpose. In the end, I left it to be fixed later (or maybe my clever co-author can do something with it). But at least I *noticed* it. Previously, I would have had no idea.
OUR LADY OF THE ISLANDS weighs in at 26,837 words. I wrote 2,000 words today, covering exactly 7 words of the outline. Which amuses me. Yeah, it isn’t always like that; sometimes bits of the outline go in verbatim; sometimes they’re dropped altogether; usually it’s something in between. But it’s funny how a few short words became two evocative scenes.
Well, I hope they’re evocative. All I know now is that they’re 2,000 words in total, a good number of them variations on “particular.” 🙂