A Whole New Style

Oh, hey, it's Monday again.

In my continued adventures with getting back into the writing and publishing world, I've noticed an extreme shift in my approach to things. My plotting style is very similar to how it used to be, but I've incorporated a lot of new things. My note-taking has become simultaneously more and less complex, depending on what I'm taking notes about. Lots of little things have changed, and while I don't regret this, there's one major change that has involved a big learning curve.

I used to be very much focused on "write first, get it right later." I'd finish an entire book very quickly and spend ages going back to tweak, edit, revise, and change. I would refuse to let myself read back over anything I'd written, unless it was to get myself back into a scene I'd left halfway through. Produce crap, shine it up later--that was my policy.

Now, though? Now there's a lot less of that. The WiP I've been working on today was resurrected at the beginning of January, and I've been working on it a fair bit since then. I'm only a paragraph into chapter two, and I'm not planning on writing any further for a while.

Why? Because I'm trying so hard to get the previous chapters up to speed. I'm not trying to make them ready to print, of course, but I want them to be solid before I keep going. When I type out "the end," I want to go back to a story that is solid and doesn't leave me with something that needs to be rewritten and rewritten and rewritten to make it legible. I'm very much a person to say "let yourself write crap," but instead of going back to shine up the entire manuscript, I've been taking it a chapter at a time.

Honestly, I prefer this new method.

It may be just for this project; I'm not sure. This story has given me trouble in the past, and was subject to a great number of revisions and chapters-inserted-later that kind of bogged the original story down into a convoluted mess. Shining up each chapter so the details are clear and concise has helped me focus on getting everything going in the direction it needs to go. Much like plotting gives me a general map to my destination, this method of writing helps me enjoy each step of the journey instead of getting lost in the race to finish.

Obviously neither method is wrong, but I think, for this project at the very least, some perfectionism and lingering has helped me make something that keeps me from dreading each new day at the keyboard.

'Til next time,
J.