Something I keep forgetting is, Place of Safety is a massive undertaking. I'm in the middle of restructuring the outline so I will know what I do and don't need, for now...and I know I'll discard it as I find new ideas and details to add. Plus, I've got dozens of books on The Troubles to dig through for those details, not to mention Derry of the Past's facebook page and NICRA's and CAIN's websites and on and on...so yesterday as I was looking at it, I pictured myself facing this massive wave on the North Shore of Oahu, about to crash down on me...and me unable to swim. Gave me a monster headache.
I have to keep reminding myself, I'm not getting this done by the end of the year. Maybe I'll have a rough draft...very rough...but I need to keep aware enough to know it's only a start and doesn't need to be perfect. That's a bad habit I was in -- trying to make everything fit right in the first go-through then hone it...which doesn't work. At all. And is nothing but a waste of time and effort.
The great thing about doing The Alice '65 was seeing just how many times I'd gone through it and redone it and gotten feedback and redone it, again and again and again, with more feedback, and even as I was putting it to bed, ready for submission, I was still making small changes to improve it. And get rid of as many typos as possible. Something I've found is just plain impossible. It drove me to near insanity...but it also showed me aiming for it to be right from the beginning is a waste of time.
It's going to change as I write, and it will be what it is. I know people have told me that, before, and I've read it in books on writing, but the idea doesn't sink into anyone till it's ready to. And I mean emotionally, not just intellectually. I can understand something in my head, but if it doesn't make instinctive sense to me, I have all kinds of trouble with it, and I won't know why till I'm able to fit both sides together, in some way.
I'm going to have a lot of that turmoil working on this book, I know, because I'm heading into uncharted territory, for me. But at the same time, I'm focusing on the instinctive part of the story more than the intellectual...I think...because that's where Brendan's truth lies. That's why the outline is only the most basic map showing me the path of a very long journey.
So to keep from spinning into a Tasmanian Devil of a writer, that's all I'm going to focus on.
I have to keep reminding myself, I'm not getting this done by the end of the year. Maybe I'll have a rough draft...very rough...but I need to keep aware enough to know it's only a start and doesn't need to be perfect. That's a bad habit I was in -- trying to make everything fit right in the first go-through then hone it...which doesn't work. At all. And is nothing but a waste of time and effort.
The great thing about doing The Alice '65 was seeing just how many times I'd gone through it and redone it and gotten feedback and redone it, again and again and again, with more feedback, and even as I was putting it to bed, ready for submission, I was still making small changes to improve it. And get rid of as many typos as possible. Something I've found is just plain impossible. It drove me to near insanity...but it also showed me aiming for it to be right from the beginning is a waste of time.
It's going to change as I write, and it will be what it is. I know people have told me that, before, and I've read it in books on writing, but the idea doesn't sink into anyone till it's ready to. And I mean emotionally, not just intellectually. I can understand something in my head, but if it doesn't make instinctive sense to me, I have all kinds of trouble with it, and I won't know why till I'm able to fit both sides together, in some way.
I'm going to have a lot of that turmoil working on this book, I know, because I'm heading into uncharted territory, for me. But at the same time, I'm focusing on the instinctive part of the story more than the intellectual...I think...because that's where Brendan's truth lies. That's why the outline is only the most basic map showing me the path of a very long journey.
So to keep from spinning into a Tasmanian Devil of a writer, that's all I'm going to focus on.
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