Saturday, August 10, 2013

Progress Report 5: Reclaiming the Joy of Drafting

                                                A Snowy Ephemera Fairy (Or a bug)


      Late. Indeed, I am. My reasons are my own and I shall not enumerate them here as mundanities and melodrama are ultimately just lame elaborations of the common expression, "That's life!" But I am also 27k closer to my goal (Cue the heralds). By the end of next week, I will have crossed the halfway mark to finishing Project Two Moons. Insert happy face emoticon.
      But this week deserves some trumpet toots, as well: I rediscovered the joy of drafting. That's right, "JOY." Normally, I detest drafting. Inking each word is like pulling teeth. It hurts. But I think that's because sometimes I expect my characters to smile back perfectly from the page, immediately. I don't give them time to adjust from my ephemeral mindscape to the nitty-gritty 2-D world of adverbs, adjectives, and the dreaded dangling modifier. I've got to stop expecting them to be so finite. They were in flux in my head. Likewise, I need to give them paper space to just be
      So I let two of my main protagonists banter a bit in the last chapter and watched their emotions swing between loathing and love, the vulnerability of truth and the despicable agony of hidden choices. I'm not going to keep all their quarrels. After all, my WIP is fiction, not reality TV! But letting my characters play on the page helped me to figure their hearts out.