Writing is Self Discovery

On this cloudy cool Bangkok morning I discovered three things about myself. Last week I stopped redrafting after discovering I was halfway done and still had 105K words. Not only did this mean that if the trend continued I'd end up where I began (at 200K words), but that if I even decided to cut the book into two separate books, on word count alone, both would still be considered unpublishable. I had to do something drastic. Hence the 'killing of the baby'.

So I spent four days going back to the plot on my 'Wall of Scofield' (see picture) dramatically revising it. If you think it's convoluted, you should have seen it before. Anyway, so I'm hacking away. Characters die, locations are napalmed and events are Watergated. I essentially chopped up the story into scenes and put a post-it per scene back on the map, with scribbled on it the justification for having that scene. Finally on Monday it dawns on me. Like before with plotting, writing and  redrafting, one thing has always remained constant: the further along I get in a story, the more I tend to write.

This process says something about how I am as a person. First there is procrastination. Not wanting to get to the point of actually starting something. Thinking rather than doing. That explained the 110 pages (!) leading up to the actual premise of the story. Second there is a lack of commitment. Inconsistent writing (2-3 paragraphs a day) during a time where I was not committed to writing continuously had created an inconsistant heap of superfluous action, discovery and other story elements. Reading back it seems like there's an action scene around every corner, verbal diarrhea in everyone's mouth and repetitive explanations of every little plot secret. Third and final was the preaching. I talk too much and it comes over as preaching. So the remaining third of the story was laced with explanations why things had happened the way they did or presenting a moral of the story (of which I had more than a dozen). I have found my three root problems of bad writing.

I wanted too much.

It's apparent even with this very blog or when I have a conversation with someone.

Less is more and I have learned my lesson.

Now I have to put it into practice.