How can I articulate my creative vision -clearly -in an engaging manner and -still have time left over to live?
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| Sisyphus overcoming |
MISSION STATEMENT
I have been blogging for over a week now, and it just dawned on me that I have not really specified the goal of this reflection journal. Before writing the Mission Statement, I’d like to mention the tragic state of affairs that led me to this exercise. It was a novella that I wrote, which didn’t turn out to be very good. I spent a lot of time on it, and still, it did not meet with the kind of reaction that I expected. The disappointment was rough on me. With this blog, I am trying to understand the disconnect that occurred between my presentation and the reader’s experience while working on my Novella #2.
One of the mistakes that I made was to focus too much on editing and not enough on content. I love to edit and I love reading nicely-edited texts, so I ended up line-editing pages of text that revolved around bad ideas. For this writing endeavor, I’m going to initially focus on content only: descriptions, dialogue, and events will happen freely, and I won’t think about correctness, conciseness, or clarity. I won’t work on that easy-to-read flow until the content is written. With that, I mean completely written. For this story, I’m planning to write the content, revise it, rework it, and revise it again before I even start to look at editing. Then, I may add in some descriptions. Once again, I am withholding the line-editing process in this endeavor, and edits in the form of comb-throughs and language fix-ups will be completed only at the very end.
In this top ten list of potential topics, “editing” is now listed last.
- Research: Is that true?
- Clarity of Plot, Clarity of Vision
- Identify the Genre, Target Audience, and Pacing of the Story
- Clarify: Subtext and Theme, Symbolism
- Identify Point of View, first-person, third-person
- Outline, Timeline of events / Timeline of Presentation
- Order of Information, Page and Paragraph level
- Order of Information, Sentence Level
- Editing Plot
- Editing Sentence, Syntax and Diction
This is very good. It's important to keep track of these things as you begin writing a story. Many writers do most of this list before they commit one word of the story to the page. Once you get going on it, it's a great guide to have handy to check your progress.
My method will likely involve a great deal of preparation. How much preparation do you complete before writing a story?
I outline a bit for chapter order. The JWC secondary world stuff is exploring such outlines. This 1-10 list is very cool and seems like it would be helpful.