Two things you’re going to notice right off: I don’t even have time to spell out Diary of a Whiny Writer anymore. From now on, it’s all acronyms, ATT (All the Time). Second: I don’t even KNOW what day it is. They all blur together now. But enough whining, even though that is what I do best. Let’s look at the bright spots — or are those just floaters in my eyeballs? Anyway, I’m beginning to benefit from getting to that point when, for better or worse, a lot of the material is down and sent to David and Barry* for their terrible swift judgment.Which means every time I start a new chapter, the bag o’ stuff that’s left is beginning to feel noticeably lighter. It’s a lot easier to focus. So much of the agony in writing is trying to somehow deliver the context necessary so that people can see why the Good Stuff is in fact so good. You waste your best material if people can’t fully appreciate the best-ness of it. Yet . . . all the context can threaten to be excruciatingly slow and boring. Can you see where I’m going with this? It’s an explanation for why the writing process is inevitably front-loaded with pain. In the beginning, you are struggling to make inherently less interesting material interesting, so that later on, the inherently most interesting stuff can just flow out, raising its arms for a triumphant victory lap, trotting on the back of all that went before it and taking all the credit. To formulate: beginning = more work, less yield; end = less work, more yield. I’m somewhere in the middle, but I can feel the turn coming.
*My editors are David and Barry. What are the odds? Every time I send them a new chapter, my email tries to automatically fill in the address for “Dave Barry.” At first, I wasn’t catching it, and I kept getting messages back from Dave Barry saying, “Looks good to me, but where’s the sex scene?”
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