oh dearie me, I have spent last night and tonight agonizing, travailing over my short story for creative writing class. I wrote my initial draft last weekend and posted it in my class for peer review. No one has reviewed it yet. In fact, my study group members seem to have fallen off the earth, or at least this side of the Internet. ok.

Then I waited all week to continue working on my story because, as I like to word it, I need to “marinate” my ideas before setting them down right. I know, I know, all the writing advice is to “write everyday, about everything” but that just feels forced to me. Because let’s face it, sometimes you just aren’t inspired and if the most you’re going to write about creatively is the dishwasher, you should probably just not write. Wait a day or two, and true inspiration will come. That’s what I think.

Anyway, so last night my creativity finished marinating and I sat down to continue my story. I’m supposed to have at least five pages but no more than ten for this assignment, keep in mind. Last night I wrote straight for three hours and did not finish until 3 AM. Brilliant!! It was the creative zone–sucked me right in. I *loved* it. loveloveloved it.

I’ve always heard writers say that their characters “wrote themselves,” or something to the effect of, “I just let her talk, and I wrote it all down.” That always struck me as slightly schizo, until now. Now I understand. (Or I’m schizo too.)

I had the basic plot, characters, and story in my head. Somewhere between the marinating and writing, the characters literally transformed themselves and, well, I just wrote it down. (Really helpful and explanatory, that.) Again, I can only describe it as being in the creative zone; things just clicked, and flowed.

Tonight I’ve been working on the story–finishing it, actually–for another couple of hours. Remember how I said that it had to be at least five but no longer than ten pages long? Right. Well, I just copied the entire text of my story into Word (I compose in Copywrite, the freeware version), and my story is THIRTEEN pages long. oy. oy! What to do? And I was even wanting to add more to it tomorrow before it’s due to turn in! egads.

The main reason it’s so long is all my crazy character development. I had to explain, after all, why my characters are about to do what I know they’re going to do and it took me a considerable amount of deliberation to figure out the ending. (I decided not to kill someone off after all; that just didn’t work out.) I simply can’t imagine cutting out anything. Everything I put in the beginning was for a purpose; I didn’t want to just dive into the action without any logic or reason why.

I’m wondering if my professor will understand why I wrote the story so long, and maybe I should just leave it as is? But I know in the morning I’ll end up re-re-re-editing it, and changing some things as I always do, and certainly adding some things, and it will possibly end up being 16 pages instead of 13. But hey, if they’re a good 16 pages, then surely he won’t deduct for my going over the limit, right? Hopefully?

It’s late. Even possibly schizo crazy writers need sleep.

[tags]writing, college[/tags]

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 30th, 2006 at 1:00 am and is filed under Miss Education, The Writer. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.