Well, I put away Alpha Centauri long enough to make some real progress in this story of mine. I put in 1,282 words today, and now I’m right at the part where I wanted to be about a month ago. But you know, I’ve noticed something interesting…
…now that I’ve reached that point, my mind has jumped ahead about 50 to 100 pages and I’m all excited about some other part of the story.
It’s weird, and I don’t know how it’s going to affect the quality of what I’m writing now, but my mind is always jumping ahead. Instead of focusing on the part of the story that’s right in front of me, I’m thinking about all the cool stuff that’s going to happen later.
I suppose that that impulse can be used for good. It helps me to be more terse in my writing now. It also helps me to include only the important stuff that affects what happens in the future. Instead of getting lost on tangents, I can distance myself from the page in front of me and ask “how is this going to affect what happens 100 pages from now?” Thus the causal chain of events is tighter (hopefully).
But I wonder if it’s not affecting the quality negatively, or making the writing experience more difficult. Harder to focus on the page in front of me because I’m thinking about all the cool stuff that’s going to come later.
Still, it’s not worth worrying about too much on the first draft. Fortunately, I enjoy rewriting and editing even more than I enjoy just getting the story on paper. It’s harder for me to create words on an empty page than it is to take a text and make it better. I can really get into the editing and rewriting work a lot easier.
And I’m still keeping myself from figuring out how the story ends. If I already knew how things ended at this point, I’d probably get bored with the story and writing it would become a lot harder. I don’t even have a vague idea how it ends–it’s going to surprise me just as much as if I were reading the story myself. I don’t know if it’s a good idea to do things this way (most of the good writers I know of go into a novel already having the whole story laid out), but I hope it works out, because that’s how I’m doing it.
In related news, school starts soon, and although I’m looking forward to having classes again (yay! something interesting to do!) I am NOT looking forward to the homework. I’ve looked at the syllabi and some of my classes require us coming to class on the first day having already completed a few assignments. Bah!
On the flipside, though, if homework weren’t such a pain I’d have little to no incentive to actually graduate and leave the university.
