I’ve written 5,400 words in the past few hours. I’m literarily exhausted. But I’m not quite done, I think.
One of the repercussions of my conversation last night with my best friend over the next batch of stories I will be focusing on, I suppose. I have a bit over a dozen stories-in-progress. I had her look at them, and we discussed each one. I found myself having to explain concepts I took for granted, defend narrative decisions for narratives yet unwritten, and finally had her pick a few of her favorites, the ones she thought she might want to read the most, based off of our discussions. Meanwhile, I already had a few favorites, the ones I hoped to write first. Between our two sets, I was able to narrow it down to a story I could sit down and write.
And boy, did I write. Life being life, I couldn’t sit down to write until midafternoon. By dinnertime, I had more than 4,000 words on the page. Another 1,000 or so after dinner, and the thousand or so I’d already written, and I’m looking at 6,500 words worth of new story content.
And I’m not quite done yet. I might go back to writing after this, though it would be in my better interest to get a good night’s sleep first, I think. But when the Muse sings her song, the artist must reply.
Granted, this is rough draft material. I am writing passionately, but I’m also kind of just pouring words out onto the screen. Pixelated regurgitation, in a totally not-disgusting way. I might as well be talking about making diamonds, when all I did was shovel a few hundred pounds of coal into a mine cart. I’ve got plenty of excavation left before I find the gemstones in this spoil tip of words and paragraphs.
Still, five thousand words in an afternoon, all brand new, could-be-published prose, makes me feel good. That’s a novel in ten days, if I kept it up. It almost makes me feel like I could be a professional writer or something.
Writing is a lot of work. The only people who think writers need ideas are people who aren’t writers themselves, I believe. It’s taking those ideas and hammering them into actual stories that is tough. I affectionately refer to myself as a wordsmith all the time, but it’s an apt analogy, I believe. I’m taking a lump of ideas, burning out the impurities, using muscle to shape them into something useful, and pouring a whole heck of a lot of sweat and blood into my work.
Today I poured some awesome molten creativity into a mold. Tomorrow I have to bring out the tools, roll up my sleeves, and get to work forging it into something sharp.
I’m having the time of my life doing this. 😊
Written while listening to Tiamat’s A Deeper Kind of Slumber (1997).
The Artist and the Engineer 