Katherine Mankiller


Paradigm shift.
May 20, 2006, 8:36 pm
Filed under: novels

Now that I’m working on a novel, I keep having to tell myself to slow down, that I have plenty of room.
I’m not convinced it’s working. In fact, I think I’m going to have to go back and flesh stuff out. I’ve got stuff in here that’s taking paragraphs that probably needs to take pages.
It’s okay. I not only have room, I have time. As long as I meet my daily wordcount, I’ll finish.

6 Comments

6 Comments

Is that typical for you? I tend to write that way with fiction. Whereas most writers’s first drafts are too “fat” and have to be trimmed, mine are more like a skeleton that have to be fleshed out more in revisions.

Comment by Another Voice in the Cacophony May 20, 2006 @ 11:51 pm

My first drafts tend to have a few clunky explanations that I cut, and other, more numerous areas that are inscrutable to most readers (although they make perfect sense to me and Brian). After critique, I have to flesh out the inscrutable bits.

Comment by Katherine Mankiller May 21, 2006 @ 11:08 am

I drafted about 50 pages during November for NaNoWriMo. Afterward, I cut about 12 pages of pure exposition. 😉 Then I had to go back and add some setting to ground the story in time and place because it was just sort of floating in the ether.
Of course, now I’m starting over from scratch anyway.

Comment by Another Voice in the Cacophony May 21, 2006 @ 1:29 pm

Ah, yes. I used to cut the first several paragraphs/several pages of everything I wrote. 🙂 Then I went too far in the other direction for “Grandfather Paradox” and had to go back and add pages. Heh.
And I’m not starting over from scratch. I’m including chunks of the short story. It’s not a big proportion of what I have so far, but it’s there. I’m a big believer in recycling. 😉

Comment by Katherine Mankiller May 21, 2006 @ 1:40 pm

I’m using chunks of what I already had, too. I started out with a Victorian London setting but now I’ve moved it to the contemporary U.S. But the stuff I already wrote is going to be used as flashbacks to tell a parallel story. But since I’m also shifting to a 1st person POV, I’ll have to rewrite all of that stuff.
I keep telling myself I’m making it better. 😉

Comment by Another Voice in the Cacophony May 21, 2006 @ 2:17 pm

You’re making it better!
I’ve had a story shift from 3rd to 1st POV before. I had to really make an effort to edit, not read, in order to catch them all. 🙂

Comment by Katherine Mankiller May 21, 2006 @ 4:54 pm


RSS feed for comments on this post.


Comments are closed.