Thursday, October 2, 2008

Hooray for Progress!

No, I didn’t get any further in Book 1, sorry if the title was misleading, but I did discover something great!

I spent today pouring through old files, things I’d written previously, and I decided to revise a short story from my creative writing class in hopes of getting it into a magazine and establishing some credibility.

Now, I love the story itself. It’s about a girl who discovers her true heritage, and let me tell ya, it’s not even human. But reading through it, I kinda went . . . Did I write that? Yikes! The style is horrible, the pacing ghastly, the sentence structure bland, the dialogue very amateur. I even had some spots where I disobeyed the cardinal rule of writing (show don’t tell). How newb can I get?

Anyway, it will take quite a bit of work to both revise the story and bring it down to under 6,000 words (it’s almost 10,000 now). But rereading it gave me hope, because it is tangible proof that my writing abilities have improved.

Now, I wonder if, in a few years, I’ll look at Book 1 and think the same thing…

Edit: Well, I switched the perspective from third to first and got the word count down to just over 7,500. Still a lot of work to go though… It’s coming along…

1 comment:

Zach said...

Well, glad to see that you are taking your writing seriously! careful though, some of that terminology sounds as if someone graduated with and English degree!