The days of December fall away like brittle leaves from a shivering tree, and that’s my poetic excuse for not much progress at all. The holidays plus a bout of gastroenteritis ate up most of my free time, leaving me with a total of 8,110 words for Detective.
Now, we can put a positive spin on this and say I’m 2,000 words closer to the end than I was last month. Less charitably, we can say I wrote an average of 66 words per day.
But I have learned a couple things about the story.
George R. R. Martin has a great little essay about two kinds of writers: gardeners and architects. Architects plan everything out beforehand, gardeners plant seeds and watch how things grow. I tend to be more of a gardener. I go in with a basic idea of what the story will grow into, but it’s the process of writing that uncovers how we’ll get there. Put another way: I like to let my characters talk to each other for a bit before I rein them in. The writing evolves like a conversation, and like a conversation it seldom involves a central theme—it twists this way and that, sometimes repeats itself, sometimes peters out, but if it goes long enough it starts to hit its stride and really take you somewhere.
I haven’t hit that stride yet, but I do know a bit more about my characters.
I’d like to say it feels good to be writing again, but that would need several qualifiers to ring true. Writing vs. writing with purpose is like the difference between flirting and getting it on. When you flirt, it’s fun and your heart races and she seems to be digging it, but it can all fall apart with one wrong move. When you’re getting it on, you know the score.
Right now, I’m flirting with writing this book. We’re on good terms and we like hanging out, but I have no idea if this is going anywhere.