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I wrote three pages tonight, pushing through to reach the end of chapter four. I probably rushed in spots, in my eagerness to gallop out of the painfully slow marsh chapter 4 turned into. I will need to do more polishing than I usually do. But it's done.
For those keeping track at home, it took me 28 days to write the fifteen pages of chapter 4 (total pages: 75), which is much slower than my page-a-day February progress. It's not quite as depressing as that, since I have five pages stored in my chipmunk cheeks that will show up more or less intact in the middle of chapter 5, but 4 was still a delicious hummus-topped flatbread snack (by which I mean PITA).
Why so slow? I'm not sure. It's hard to maintain faith in this kind of chapter, to figure out what is interesting enough; it's all talking, no sudden rhinoceros attacks. It's tricky to convince yourself that your readers will end up wanting to read it, however necessary it is. But you really can't figure that out ahead of time, and you certainly can't sit there paralyzed by the notion that they won't; the only thing to do is write it, see if you need it, and cut it or rewrite it later if it doesn't work. I spent too much time doing the pre-semicolon things, not enough post-semicolon.
Sometimes I feel like I need to learn the same lessons for every new chapter, as well as a host of new ones. It hardly seems fair.
Well. Tomorrow: slowward!
For those keeping track at home, it took me 28 days to write the fifteen pages of chapter 4 (total pages: 75), which is much slower than my page-a-day February progress. It's not quite as depressing as that, since I have five pages stored in my chipmunk cheeks that will show up more or less intact in the middle of chapter 5, but 4 was still a delicious hummus-topped flatbread snack (by which I mean PITA).
Why so slow? I'm not sure. It's hard to maintain faith in this kind of chapter, to figure out what is interesting enough; it's all talking, no sudden rhinoceros attacks. It's tricky to convince yourself that your readers will end up wanting to read it, however necessary it is. But you really can't figure that out ahead of time, and you certainly can't sit there paralyzed by the notion that they won't; the only thing to do is write it, see if you need it, and cut it or rewrite it later if it doesn't work. I spent too much time doing the pre-semicolon things, not enough post-semicolon.
Sometimes I feel like I need to learn the same lessons for every new chapter, as well as a host of new ones. It hardly seems fair.
Well. Tomorrow: slowward!
