Pause

So I’ve decided that I’m gonna to take a very short break from working on the novel. It’ll only be about a week and a half. I’m going to work on a quick short story with a friend. But I won’t be able to share any of the details until April though ’cause we keeping it on the DL for a bit. However, I can say that I’m really excited about it. Especially since I’ve been stuck at this one scene in the novel for a while now. I can visualize it perfectly but for some reason I can’t get it written out the way I want. So I figure I need a break to clear my head anyway.

But I can already see and feel this story through a somewhat blurry lens. I’ll be trying to get my footing for the rest of this week so I can move into transitioning it into prose next week. The story is my friend’s idea and I’m just adding some pizazz to it essentially. After I got the rough synopsis/outline for it, I almost immediately had about twenty-seven ideas with some real merit to them. I haven’t really had a writing “prompt” since university so this really is a breath of fresh air for me. And for lack of a better way to say it, they’re just really fun.

It quickly made me realize how much I miss creative writing prompts/assignments and short stories in general. Then I realized that that’s how this novel started in the first place. So I dug up the original draft from way back in my senior year of university. My first thought was: “how the hell did this win an award again” which was mostly because of all the grammatical errors I hadn’t caught before I submitted it. As it stands now, I find it very hard to subscribe to the idea that the short story version is in any way “better” than the chapter one version of it. But then it hit me that as a complete piece, it worked. And I suppose it worked well to some degree.

It’s an odd sensation to say the least to learn from my own past work. In re-reading it, I found that my use of dialogue is usually the focal point while my ability to describe the setting can sometimes leave much to be desired. I have the tendency to lean very heavily on dialogue and I love using the unreliable narrator cheat (it’s not really a cheat but I think you get my point) to avoid getting extremely descriptive in places where the story doesn’t require it. But I won’t get in depth on what I learned about my writing, I just wanted to take this opportunity to say that sometimes you can be your best student. Who better to learn from than yourself, right?

Anyway, I’m really excited to work on this project and I can’t wait to see it in its final form. My mind is just jumping from epiphany to epiphany as I write this and I’ve honestly stopped like six times during this to make notes. But I will share some of the details on the blog as soon as I can.