What I've Been Doing

[lisa_goldstein]

I haven’t written here because I spent October worrying about the election, and then November wondering if trump would succeed in ending our long experiment in democracy.  (And it pissed me off that his reasons for doing so were so tawdry, just that he wanted to stay out of jail.  He could have at least had some political philosophy behind his actions, however vile, but the reason for his attempted coup, like his reasons for everything, was just petty narcissism — “It’s all about MEEEE.”)

Those months weren’t a total loss, though.  I wrote postcards to voters in swing states (the introvert’s version of phone-banking), and my workshop looked at the first third of my novel.  And so I learned that I’d messed up a novel in an entirely new way.  One of the characters had completely taken over, warping all the other characters and making them act in ways completely foreign to their natures.  And the more this went on the worse it got, and the ending was pretty awful.

Luckily I showed it to my workshop, and they convinced me to take the plot in another, and more believable, direction.  They only read the beginning, for which I give thanks to Whoever, because the end, as I said, was embarrassingly bad.  But even with that beginning they could tell it was going off the rails.

I always think, after I finish a book, Okay, I figured out how that works, I know how to do this now.  Unfortunately, every book has its own problems; with every book I get a whole new lesson about a different aspect of writing.  This is the first book, though, where I have to rewrite about a third.  And it took me a while to come to terms with that.  I’d already written the damn thing once — why do I have to do it again?

All I can say is, workshops are a very good thing.

 

Comments

[sergebroom]

Someone suggested that trump's foot-dragging post-Election is so that he can rake in donations to officially fight for recounts, but really to pour dough in his bank account.

[lisa_goldstein]

Yeah, I heard that too, and I believe it. (Though he'd be delighted if some court or other overturned the election in his favor.) He really is the worst person ever to become president.

[sergebroom]

Yeah... When someone has people forget how bad the Dubya regime was...