I have become the worst sketch-writing student ever. In the beginning it was easy to hand in the two sketches a week. My writing got kick-started, which is wonderful; however, I'm writing everything except sketches. I finally--and with accelerating speed--got the seventh draft of my novel done, and I handed out copies to my writer friends for input. I think a couple more light revisions and that thing will be done.
I am now devoting all of my energy to a memoir I'm cowriting with my sister. We have decided we want a good solid first draft done by midsummer, which is when she starts graduate school. I expect that my first draft will be 300pp and that the second draft will mostly involve deleting 150pp of that. I am writing things now that I know I will delete later--but I never censor myself in a first draft. It all goes down on the page in the first unreeling of the narrative. My sister is writing her half now too. We went over our drafts this summer (I only had 60pp then and I felt guilty for dragging my feet). Our material was surprisingly in synch--integrating our two narratives should be a natural process, which I'm not sure when we'll do, but I suspect it will be after I have trimmed my material down to 150pp.
I need to stop taking writing classes--I'm so busy writing I don't have time to do the class work. I have ideas for the next four books I'd like to write--all novels. I also have three unfinished novels that maybe I should take a look at again and think about finishing.
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3 comments:
I'm impressed that you have four novel ideas already qeued up in addition to ones that you've started.
The thing is three of them came to my while I was on my two vacations last summer. I should take more vacations--although now I could write for the next 4 years nonstop.
That's one of the goals isn't it? To have enough material and imagination to write full-time, and with a good agent and luck make a living from it.
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