Tag Archives: wip

Research…

Posted on by

There’s always a fine line when a project starts between wanting to just do the work quietly and wanting to blog about every step along the way. In the interest of not giving away the store before it’s even written, I’ll try to keep my discussion points fairly general in terms of the next product in the jeffreytharp.com pipeline. Suffice to say it’s not going to be quite like any of my previous efforts.

I haven’t set down to a writing effort yet that didn’t start off with research… and that’s where the lion’s share of my self-imposed writing time is allocated at the moment. I’m doing my best to spend an hour a day sourcing background information in the hope that once I have a stack of notes, I’ll actually be ready to sit down and put words on the page.

What I supposed you need to know now is there is a fresh work in progress. What I hope you’re going to see at the end of this trail is a deeply personnel (and intensely sarcastic) look at my relationship with life, work, and social media. It may not be of interest to anyone. It may not sell a single copy. But from the preliminary research I’ve done so far, I’m wholly fascinated by the ground this effort will end up covering.

Best efforts…

Posted on by

This was very likely to turn into a long, rambling collection of words that wouldn’t end up saying anything at all. It felt like that kind of night. Actually, it’s felt like that all day, maybe even longer than that. Despite my best intentions, it may yet turn into a bit of a ramble. It certainly feels like it could.

The good news is that the Muse hasn’t left me high and dry. I’m still sitting down every night and making progress on the short story in waiting. I sit down as close to 7PM on the nose as I can manage and don’t get back up until there are at least 300 fresh words sitting in front of me. Sometimes it takes 20 minutes, other times closer to three hours. Admittedly, sometimes the words that end up there just plain suck. More rarely, the ones that appear are actually rather good. Like Gump’s chocolates, when I sit down I never know what I’m going to get.

As far as I’ve been able to tell, the quality of the output doesn’t particularly matter. What seems to matter is the routine, the habit of writing consistently day in, day out, when you’re sick, when you’re tired, when there are a dozen other things screaming out for your attention. What matters is sitting down and letting the words flow – or sometimes forcing them to flow against their will. It can feel like that a lot.

What I’m going to end up with 4000-odd words and 14-ish days from now is generously called a first draft. I know that draft is going to suck… and I don’t mean just a little. It’s going to be God awful – full of half formed ideas, words that aren’t really words, and phrases that are repeated on at least every fifth page. That’s fine. Not fine for public consumption fine, but fine by the standards of the first draft. It means finally there’s something there that wasn’t there before. Something that I drug into the world kicking and screaming out of my own head and onto the form of evil that fills me with the most dread – the blank, white page with its solitary flashing cursor.

Even after it’s no longer a first draft – maybe a 3rd or 4th version – after it’s been anointed as “final” I know I won’t be entirely happy with it. I’ll want to change and tweak and craft just a bit more. Right now I know it’s not even in the realm of good enough, but it will be. I think. That’s the theory I’m working under, anyway.

OK, yeah, so maybe this did turn into a long, rambling collection of words despite my best efforts to the contrary. Sorry about that.

The hardest part…

Posted on by

With much respect for Tom Petty, I have to tell you that I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusion that the waiting is the hardest part. As far as I can tell from personal experience, it’s the writing that regularly threatens to knock your teeth down your throat and beat you into a bloody pulp of submission… But hey, maybe that’s just my perspective.

PressDoing a day’s work with your brain is exhausting. It’s naturally a different kind of exhausting than baling hay or digging a ditch, but it’s still an activity that will leave you mentally spent at the end of the day. Normally, I’d recommend making sure to take the time to mentally recharge, rest, recreate, and relax, but when you’re in sight of the end, the only thing your exhausted brain wants to do is keep pushing ahead. Even with your eyes glazed over, your brain wants to drag you across the finish line. Or at least across the first of several finish lines you need to get past.

I realize the last two paragraphs probably read like gibberish. In this one instance, I’m going to be OK with that. You see, I’m two chapters away from being able to call what I’ve been madly typing away at for months a First Draft instead of just another Work in Progress. Trust me, that’s an important distinction if only to the guy behind the keyboard. It means that in maybe a week or two the first draft will get its first full length read through, polishing will start, and then it will make its way to several people who have graciously agreed to read a first draft that’s sure to be full of grammar, punctuation, usage, style, and myriad other problems. Then it’s more polishing, revision, cover design, formatting for e-publication, polishing, developing sales descriptions, publication, figuring out how to leverage jeffreytharp.com to sell ebooks on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and trying to wrap my head around whether it’s worth putting a book of snarky observations into a dead tree edition.

Two thousand or so words now stand between me and where I want to be. This isn’t the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end… but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Stall speed…

Posted on by

The thing you have to keep in mind about writing is that it’s way more art than science. Sure, there’s a set of basic rules about where the comma goes, what gets to be capitalized, and something about predicates and adverbs that I really never caught on to when I was in school. Since the rules are sort of flexible and there’s no actual penalty for ignoring them, I find it easier just to go with what looks right than what may be technically accurate. Encyclopedias are often technically accurate, but when’s the last time you saw someone reading Volume K for fun and relaxation? That’s not my point, though.

As much as I’d hoped to be able to get my work in progress to the point where it could spend some time with an editor this spring, that possibility is looking less and less likely as more and more days go by without actually making any progress. I seem to have reached stall speed and stayed there since a week or two before Christmas. It takes some serious self discipline to plug away at something like a book day after day, especially when you’re in the middle part of the tunnel and there’s no end in sight. It’s sure easy to set aside for just a few days… but damn is it hard to pick up again a month and a half later, even when you realize you are desperately behind your self imposed schedule.

The solution, of course, is to just sit down and force yourself to do it – to stay at the keyboard until word come out either from inspiration or are wrung out of your head by sheer force of will. In either case, the words won’t necessarily be good, or even usable, but it’s the first step towards getting back into the routine and getting back to the point where you can see progress again. Until then, all the pissing and moaning in the world isn’t going to do any good… even though it does make you feel better. Momentarily. Sooner or later, though, you’ve just got to suck it up and get back at it.