Writing News
This week I got chapter five back from Jenn and made an important discovery. It is all horrendously awful! Jenn didn’t actually say this, but after reading her notes I came to this realization all on my own. Now I have said this several times in the past. I wrote my rough draft sometime in 2004 and I recall my instructor telling me to make some major changes to this chapter. Then during one of my revisions when I cut 8,000 words out of the whole thing I cut out pages and pages of descriptions of my main character being beautified in Ancient Assyrian fashion. So that was a big improvement, but today I had this terrible realization. Sometimes if you have been revising the same chapter for nine years and have learned much about writing in that time…you have to just scrap what you have been revising and start over with your more improved writing style. Argh! So I opened a blank document and started writing, after looking up drawings of what some guys think that an Assyrian palace’s front porch might look like. It is going pretty slow, but I am able to cut and paste some passages that contain vital research back into my new document. Now I can add things like a viable plot question to my chapter, argh! I can’t believe how awful it remained even after so many years of revision. But this is great in a horrible kind of way because my new chapter is bound to be better…it has to be.
