EXAMINING MY WRITING PROCESS
Posted on May 10, 2019
Today I broke ground, meaning I started writing chapter one of Arcana Creek, my newest project. After nine weeks of working with my fifth-grade class at a year-round school, this track out has been eagerly anticipated by me. I find that the longer I go without actively writing, I only edit during the weeks I'm teaching, the more anxious and downright depressed I get. After only one day of writing, my spirits are amped up and I feel a how lot snappier. The following sections will detail some of what I was up to on this first day.
First Day Writing Jitters
Starting a new project can be a tad nerve-wracking. You always wonder if you'll be able to get it off the ground. Writing is a solitary occupation where you really stay within yourself as the ideas go from your head onto the paper. I find creating worlds to be a form of mental therapy, that as I build the setting, characters, and plot, my mental well-being sharpens. I tap into dormant sources of knowledge and trigger internal discussions about just how crisp a line of dialogue is or is not. Sentences get laid down and then moved around, swapped, repositioned, phrases cut to streamline the force of the sentence's impact. And if you keep in your head that every sentence should have an impact and contribute to the overall rhythm, you unlock a part of your creativity that you don't see every day. At least that's how it feels for me. There's an adrenalin rush when a scene falls into place. I had that several times today as I penned my first chapter and part of the second.
Research Rollercoaster
My research can take me all over. I found today was particularly endemic of that. I wanted to see if a waterway could be called a run outside of what my own grandmother called her stream behind her house. I managed to find a brilliant map that shows just that and the word is associated with the Mid-Atlantic area where I'm placing the story. Yea!
I also had to research the size of trees to make sure the giant tree in my grandmother's backyard was accurate. I went with oak because it could reach eighty feet. I needed that extreme height because the tree in the story is based on one that towered over my grandmother's home, its gigantic limbs stretched out over her roof in almost tentacle-like fashion. That idea is critical to a later scene of destruction.
Max has to fetch a can of Del Monte Cut Green Beans from an unorthodox stairwell pantry. I had to check out the varieties of beans to make sure the scene rang true. No French style for my cast.
My last research was on the look of a dirt basement. That was a quick visual check that reminded me my grandmother's basement had stacked stone walls.
It's Third Person, Dummy!
I just got finished the last two volumes of Irving Wishbutton, and it's written in the third person. Couple that with the fact that the four books before had also been written in the first person, and I found myself having to fight the urge to use I and my. Arcana Creek is my first book written in the third person in well over two years and I'm glad I took on this challenge. I think it taps into other writing strengths working in the third person and the sense of exploration I feel with it after being away for so long is invigorating.
You So Funny, Microsoft Word
I wrote a line of dialogue: "What's all the racket down there?"
Microsoft Word suggested: "What's the entire racket down there?"
The Case of the Accidental Plagiarist
After writing over 3,000 words today, I mowed later in the afternoon. Mowing let's my brain wander, and I cultivate a great number of new ideas as I run my pattern over the lawn. I came up with a great idea for a Sunken Library and also reflected on how I'd accidentally plagiarized with my now unpublished Stomper Rex book. I'd unpublished it years ago because the writing didn't hold up to what I currently can do and its weaknesses were obvious to me. Anyway, this year I'm again teaching reading after not doing such for seven years. One group is reading The Phantom Tollbooth with me. There is a scene where Milo gets in a vehicle and it only moves when he is silent. It goes without saying. When I read that, I flashed back to the tank scene I'd written near the end of Stomper Rex. He had made the tank run by the same means. I had read The Phantom Tollbooth over a decade ago and somehow stolen from the book without realizing it. Good thing I'd unpublished the book for other reason years ago. Guess I instinctively knew something was seriously wrong with the project in more ways than one.
Irving Wishbutton Update and Free Stuff!
Book three just debuted this month as a print edition. Look for the fourth and final volume to debut in its own glorious physical state in the next few weeks. I am eager to see this series reach a wider audience and feel it's my project to bring a ton of new readers into the Clopper fold. If you've read books two and three, and I know I've had some healthy sales of those books these last three months, please leave a review of both on Amazon. I'm trying to get more reviews for those books in the series. If you send me proof that you posted reviews of those two e-novels, I'll send you an epub of the fourth book for free. Of course, I'd love to see you also review that one as well. Thanks in advance!