I started a new story tonight. Well, not exactly. I started a completely new revision to a rather old story. I have always been very fond of a story that I wrote back in 1994, which I called “He Had the Weight of the World On His Shoulders/He’s Got the Whole World In His Hands”. I loved the idea behind the story, which originated with something my Grandpa once said. Back then, it was rejected all around, without comment. But I still like the idea of the story and I thought that any writing is better than no writing. Why not take what I’ve learned of my craft in the 13 years since I first wrote the story and see if I can’t improve it into something that I could reasonably sell.
Tonight I started on that. I wrote about 400 words, which make up the first part of the story. I can see places in the old manuscript where I overdid things, where the writing doesn’t sound natural or where I bang the reader over the head with things when I should be more subtle. Also, the original story was some 8,100 words long. I’m trying to cut the revised version of the story in half. I like what I’ve done so far. We’ll see how it progresses.
Oh, by the way, the story is a fantasy–or a futuristic fantasy–which is something that I rarely do.
I’m not sure how well I will actually work with 5 or 6 different things in various phases of completion. It could get confusing I suppose, but it also gives me the ability to pick and choose among projects so that if I get tired of any one thing, I can work on something else until I am no longer tired of what I was originally working on–or I find another way to approach it. The important thing is writing as much as possible. That’s the only way to learn and the only way to improve.
RSS - Posts