Saturday, May 3, 2014

One-on-One Update

So the One-on-One tutorial through Stanford's OWC program is totally awesome!  (Gosh, you can tell I was a teen in So. Cal. during the 80's, right?)

Anyway,  my instructor has given some incredible insights into my story and I've been busy chopping 10,000 words!  Yikes!  I was apparently a bit long-winded towards the beginning of my story and needed to get to the action a bit faster.  So, I used some "Literary Spanx" (as my instructor called it) and condensed the first 60 pages down to 40.  She reread some of the sections and gave a few more suggestions of what to chop and edit a bit more.  Some of my favorite lines have been chopped so I am trying to deal with that right now but it builds character, right?  :)

I've also been able to get up to 50,000 words on book 3 - so, two-thirds through it approximately.  For some reason, I am concerned that this book will be more challenging to get up to 75-85K.  I'm not sure why that is the case.  Right now I've written all the major scenes and will need to go back and add some more detail and flow.   I am hoping to get to 60,000 words this weekend.

I prefer to do fast drafts to get everything down and then go back and edit.  Of course, the editing is very difficult for me.  Yuck! I hate it…I mean, it is a wonderful opportunity to grow as a writer.  Yeah, that's what I meant.


No comments:

Post a Comment