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I’m finishing up the first draft of my fourth Duffy book. I had written about 220 pages and then put it aside to write a stand alone. i thought it would be easy to just pick up where I left off.
It wasn’t, in fact, it sucked.
A lot.
Now, however, I’ve put together a couple of weeks of steady work and it’s coming alive and writing itself again.
What happened?
It wasn’t letting it breathe, taking a break or some sort of end to writer’s block.
It was ass-on-chair-fingers-on-keyboards. In other words I wrote.
I wrote when i didn’t want to. I wrote sections that I thought were bad. I wrote stuff that i know I’ll have to change. I guessed at plot points and I straightened out some problems.
I started at the beginning and fixed characters, got rid of others and made sure I got all their names straight. It was tedious.
But I could feel the momentum build and that magic that happens when you write where the story takes on a life of its own.
Magic that happens when you do a shitload of work.
There’s no muse quite like a gun to the head, I find. Nigel Collins, Ring ed., is only the most recent gun, but there have always been others.
I HATE it, but you’re absolutely right. If you write one short project a year, that’s one thing; if you write a lot, all of the time, and constantly under unforgiving deadlines, you soon arrive at the point where you just have to throw words on the screen and make it happen.
It’s like Mike Royko once said, “Writing is easy. Everyday, I sit at my typewriter until blood comes out of my fingertips.” Or like Tom Schreck once said, “Rivest, you’re my hero and better than I am in every way. I want to be you.” At least, I think you said that. Oh, well, either way I just wrote it so it must be true. You’ve been wiki-leaked.