Writing vs. Writing About Writing

Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009

In spite of having emergency dental work that included two root canals, and in spite of a persistent case of influenza and the perpetual headaches it seems to have left me with, I’ve made a highly productive time out of the last couple of months.

I’ve done a lot of work on The Winds of Winter:

• I finished three scenes near the end of the poem. That leaves me with the last scene (or perhaps two more scenes) to write. I now know how the whole plot develops, and it’s only a matter of execution.
• I’ve rewritten two scenes at the beginning of the poem, to improve the story setup.
• I wrote another scene that belongs in the revised beginning — either the whole thing, or the guts of it. Maybe I’ll decide it needs a few lines of fleshing out, but I’ve got most of it.

All of this means that I’m well on track to finishing the first draft of The Winds of Winter this year — probably early this year — after ten years! (I started writing it in 1999.)

And that’s why I’ve been quiet. I write about writing when my story is stalled — when I’m too tired to keep writing metered verse, or when I’ve hung up on the plot, or don’t know how to approach a scene. When my story-writing is going well, I don’t want to interrupt it for complicated essays about writing.

So I’ve been story-writing.

Merry Christmas, all.

Tags: writing about writing
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