on words
I’ve been thinking a lot about words recently. In part, this is because I spent the past week at the Milford Science Fiction Writers retreat at Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, North Wales, truly a glorious place and one that I highly recommend. I spent most of the week working my way through new words. Part of my project reconsideration process involves working my way through old words, half written stories and incomplete ideas, but I didn’t spend as much time on these as I’d originally planned. The seduction of the new and shiny, I suppose.
More generally, this past week has gotten me thinking about writing. I suppose at one end of a continuum, we could describe writing as stringing words together. This is technically true in some sense, but it doesn’t capture the art of creation inherent in writing, of creating a story that captures the attention and imagination of the reader. It also brings to mind Morecombe and Wise and Andre Previn.
For the first time in a long time, I sat down with a plan for a story, from beginning through its middle and to its end. Admittedly, it was a particularly short story, just about 1000 words, but those words flowed smoothly. And even with the plan, the ending was different than from my original outline, but the current ending seemed to work better. We’ll see what the readers say.
But the story I spent most of the week on is a different beast. Each day I sat down with my outline and current draft, looking out at the other writers and the shelves of books in the wonderous space of the Library, the story slipped through my fingers.
I think I know what’s going on. I think that the idea of the story is unhappy with the outlines I’ve come up with, and it keeps trying to direct me towards a path to a better story. We’ll see; I’m about to sit down with it again, having let it sit for a day, and the idea I came up with this morning seems to work well with both my intention and what I understand of the story’s preferred path. Again, we’ll see how things go.
But this was the first time in a long time that I’ve spent a whole week with a single story, largely unperturbed by the day job, and it reminded me, as does the British Aikido Federation annual summer school, that this extended, focus attention on a single task does create an environment which can lead to interesting insights and some significant progress.
Long live the words.
multijimbo 