If you are a newspaper person, you write several items for publication each day. That’s what you do if you are writing news. A person who wants to spend months polishing the perfect story about the breaking news of a presidential assassination is not thinking clearly.
Some stories must be told immediately. But other kinds of stories require time, much in the way that the making of wine requires time. A batch of instant wine is a bad idea.
Nothing about this is profound. But writing can be a matter of habit, and some of us have a hard time breaking habits.
I’ve devised a home cure for myself. If you think it might help you, here’s the recipe:
I’ve started a story that I don’t plan to write for a while. In fact, I’m not planning. I might write a draft next year.
The story exists in my head mostly and, to a lesser extent, on some index cards.
I started with one character and added another. Those fictional characters are in my imagination. They spend most of the day lurking beneath the level of consciousness. They pop up sometimes when I’m stuck in traffic or am running the vacuum cleaner.
When they do, I take a five-minute break to write a snatch of dialog on an index card.
Sometimes I make notes on a scene that runs over several notecards.
A lifetime of habit tells me I must write a draft.
My sense as a reader is that I’m not wasting time letting these characters age a bit. That is, I’m not wasting my time by letting these characters become clearer to me.
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