A week into National Novel Writing month and I already have a very rough outline of the story that I want to develop. I’ve taken a different approach to writing this story as compared to my last attempted novel, forming three characters deeply and letting them drive the action until the story revealed itself to me. I’ve also had the advantage this time around of having read James Scott Bell’s excellent book Plot and Structure and am currently working on Ray Bradbury’s essay collection Zen in the Art of Writing.
This time around I have written every day and have not revised any of it. There are huge chunks of writing that are crap, and small nuggets of brilliance hidden deep in run-on sentences and misspelled words. Bukowski once wrote a poem that included the phrase “Sifting through the madness for the word, the line the way.” Tonight I plan, like a 49er, to dip my pan into the cyber sediment collecting in the recesses of my computer and begin to craft a story from the madness that I’ve chronicled.
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