• Main
  • Fiction
    • Going Back
      • One Hour Before
      • One week before
      • June 1978 – an extract from Going Back
    • Shore Leave
      • Shore Leave – an extract
    • A Little Bird Told Me
    • The Tip Run
    • Damnation’s Cellar
    • Tender Blue
    • The Flyer
    • Middletown Dreams
    • Morningside Crescent – an extract
  • Non Fiction
    • Dear Friends
    • 50 Musical Memories
    • Rediscovering Rush Intro
      • Rediscovering Rush
    • Left-handed under the Iron Curtain
    • Let’s do the show right here…
    • Home away from home – Alba
  • About
  • Blog
  • The 60at60 index
  • Mastodon
Richard Watt

Monthly Archives: September 2014

Progress Report

Posted on September 28, 2014 by Richard

Draft 2 is now up over 17,000 words. This is definite progress. I’ve now come to the crucial point, what Larry Brooks calls the First Plot Point (I think it should have capitals).

I want to write it today, but my brain is fried, and I’ll rush it and need to rewrite it. Which is kind of the point of the draft, I know, but I’ve been thinking about this point for weeks now, and I still don’t know what it will be like until I start writing it. Everything up to this point is pretty darned good, though I say so myself, although bits of this afternoon’s work are already rewriting themselves in my head.

So the answer is – stop now. Write the key scene as soon as I have sufficient time and mental energy, and go back out into the world, see what it looks like.

Maybe even reintroduce myself to all those people who also live in my house and see if I can help with dinner…

It’s been a solid afternoon’s work.

Posted in Shore Leave |

A draft is still a draft

Posted on September 21, 2014 by Richard

I’m 7500 words into draft 2, and…

And I’ve maybe reused about 200 from draft 1.  Fixing up the structure has changed the story so dramatically that I’m basically starting from scratch.  After an initial moment or two of despondency (“you mean I’m going to have to write it all out again?”), I’m actually really happy with the way it’s going.  All that foreshadowing I was going to have to bodge in to the start because the ending has changed is now seamlessly in place.  Also, I’m doing some intriguing things with tense and voice which I think are going to work – and won’t be too hard to fix if they don’t work.

Not worrying about detail, just blasting through getting it all down on paper again.  Then, I’ll start the second second draft (it makes sense to me)

Anyway, your sneak preview consists of one line:

“Dr. Goldman introduced David to the idea of being worried, and he thinks he understands it – it is what happens to him when he does not know what will happen in the future.”

What – me worry?

Posted in Shore Leave |

Hiatus

Posted on September 16, 2014 by Richard

Richard Watt has 9 books on his on-hiatus shelf: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter, Pope’s Rhinoceros by Lawrence Nor…

My “currently reading” Goodreads list had reached double figures. Even for me – I like to have at least two things on the go at any one time – this was a bit excessive, so I took a look at it.

It covers books like “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”, which I am quite enjoying, but am finding hard to maintain in my mental space, and “Numbers in the Dark”, which just needs me to be a bit more focussed (Calvino really isn’t falling-asleep-bedtime reading) all the way to “Gravity’s Rainbow”, which, let’s face it, has been in the ‘currently reading’ pile for more than ten years now, and is really going to have to be reassigned.

I’d like to say I’m currently reading all those books, but I’m not, so I created a new category – on hiatus – for things I’ll probably or possibly one day get back to, but which I can’t honestly claim to be in the middle of, since I can’t remember what the beginning was like.

Worryingly, it contains ‘A Wild Sheep Chase’, which a) I thought I had read years ago, and b) I’m convinced I finished reading some time last year. The only way to be absolutely sure about this will be to read it again…

 

Posted in Tangents | Tags: #calvino, #currentlyreading, #mrnorrell, #murakami, #notenoughhoursintheday, #onhiatus, #pynchon |

Restructuring

Posted on September 15, 2014 by Richard

Two solid days of work purely on structure, and I have a radically different story from the one I thought I was telling. The really good part is that several times as I was reshaping everything and slotting the parts together, I actually said out loud “Aha!” I actually have been surprising myself with how well the foreshadowing and the red herrings are going to work.

There’s still a lot to figure out – including making the key plot element believable without giving away the secret at the heart of it – but that’s what the second draft is for.

Oh, and if Larry Brooks is reading this (you never know); I have a concept, I have a premise and I have a theme. It’s already ten times the story it used to be!

Posted in Writing |

All Change

Posted on September 6, 2014 by Richard

So, yesterday I sat down and began to apply all that I’ve learned in the last few weeks to what is still, at the moment, called Shore Leave.  Here’s what I know now:

It’s going to be a radically different story to the one I envisaged.  In draft 1, some stuff happens, but not enough of it, and various things don’t happen which need to.

I finally figured out the biggest problem, which is that while the relationship between Character 1 and Character 2 remains opaque to them, it is clear to the reader.  The reader needs to be as confused as everyone else, so they want to find out.

It read more like a memoir than anything else.  It needs to read like a novel.

There is at least four chapters’ worth of stuff – really good stuff – in a two-page afterthought written as a letter, which I shoehorned in to the end as a kind of deus ex machina.  To be fair, I did know this already; it was something I hadn’t even thought of when I began to write the first draft, but it’s now vividly clear to me what needs to happen with it.

And finally, I need to get going with it.  So many ideas in my head now…

Posted in Shore Leave |

In the dark…

Posted on September 5, 2014 by Richard

Amazing how much more writing was getting done when the internet was down!

Question: how do I keep myself from overdoing the research? I had a quick question about a character’s job which has turned into some detailed reading on WW2 shipyards….

Posted in Shore Leave |

Winter is icumen in

Posted on September 4, 2014 by Richard

I have classical music on one screen (currently listening to Gabriel Prokiofiev’s Violin Concerto) and on the other one, I’m busy setting things up and figuring out how to attack the second draft. Following #WDNWC14 it’s going to be significantly different to draft 1 – probably the thing to do is just get on with it, but I have new toys to play with…

Posted in Shore Leave | Tags: #WDNWC14 |

Richard Watt

  • About
  • Home page

Archives

  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • October 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • December 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • September 2017
  • October 2016
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • December 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • March 2009
  • April 2007
  • March 2007
  • February 2007
  • January 2007
  • December 2006
  • November 2006
  • October 2006
  • September 2006
  • July 2006
  • June 2006
  • May 2006
  • April 2006
  • March 2006
  • October 2005
  • September 2005
  • August 2005

Categories

  • 50 Musical Memories
  • 60at60
  • Beatles
  • Book Reviews
  • Dear Friends
  • Music
  • Pink Floyd
  • Rediscovering Rush
  • Shore Leave
  • Tangents
  • Work in Progress
  • Writing

Categories

CyberChimps WordPress Themes

© Richard Watt