Yay! Writing!

All my editing and revisional concerns are done.* Now, I write! Yay, writing! How I missed thee!**

I’m not one of those writers who has learned to enjoy revision. For me, brainstorming is fun, writing is mostly fun, and editing hovers in the seventh level of hell. Good for me and necessary and blah blah blah, but certainly my least favorite part of the job.

I was speaking to a friend who would die before planning her books out beforehand, and her theory is that the reason I do so much brainstorming and plotting and whatnot is that I’m resistant to the idea of changing it after it’s been written down. Well, yeah. Measure twice, cut once and all that. But then I know others who love to plan and just as gleefully sit down with their red pen to edit.

One of my problems is that I never have a good head for what happens once I change things. My memory of events are always as I originally wrote them. There’s a scene cut from the first book and I wrote the vast majority of the second book as if it had happened. More often than not, changing one line of dialogue makes me think that I need to rewrite the entire scene, since, in my head, each word builds on the next, and if a character says apple instead of orange, then fifty pages down the way, he can’t reference oranges, and he can’t think about oranges for those 50 pages in between. And even if he isn’t thinking about oranges on the page, he’s doing it in his head and mine, and in our heads, it is imparting an orange tint onto everything else he says. And so things seem out of place to me, as if I tried to zest an orange, only to wind up with a pile of apple peels.

I remember hearing an author speak a few years back about how, after a draft of her book was finished, she changed the identity of the villain. On the page, very little changed. But in her head, it was a total overhaul. Now that I understand.

Needless to say, I’m so happy to be back in the realm of pure writing!

_________________
* For another few weeks, until I get my copyedits back.
** Since I’ve been spending altogether too much time in waiting rooms recently, I’ve managed to take a chunk out of my TBR pile. Finally read Flowers from the Storm, and it was as good as Gina led me to believe it was. Thanks, Gina!