{"id":4024,"date":"2012-08-07T14:21:10","date_gmt":"2012-08-07T21:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.wavewithoutashore.cwgservices.org\/?p=4024"},"modified":"2012-08-07T14:24:06","modified_gmt":"2012-08-07T21:24:06","slug":"books-are-peculiar-creatures-no-two-write-alike-and-its-rarely-straight-forward","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/books-are-peculiar-creatures-no-two-write-alike-and-its-rarely-straight-forward\/","title":{"rendered":"Books are peculiar creatures. No two write alike&#8230;and it&#8217;s rarely straight forward."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve limped along since May or June on this book. It flew at first. Then&#8212;I swear it was two sentences. Break. Two sentences. Break. Erase two sentences. Write three. Break. <\/p>\n<p>That has been the progress for two months. Enough to make a writer tear her hair out. Usually I&#8217;d think I was distracted. Well, there was A-Kon, that trip south&#8230;after which things began to go like this. But it&#8217;s not as if I don&#8217;t sort of know where the book is going. What&#8217;s the matter with my focus, eh? I pride myself on being able to focus down and get to it. Nothing&#8217;s going on in the house, really? Tranquility and pretty good weather. Walking for exercise. Gardening. Tending the pond.<\/p>\n<p>I tried writing just one viewpoint in the set and leaving out the other, just to maintain continuity, to go back and write the other viewpoint as a sequence and then shuffle them into proper order later. With attendant rewrite to trim up loose ends.<\/p>\n<p>Two sentences. Break. Two more sentences. Break.<\/p>\n<p>Well, damn.<\/p>\n<p>Then, all of a sudden, I decided to do the forbidden. Vault over the stuck spots. Write the denouement.<\/p>\n<p>Part way through it I start flipping back and adding bits to scenes all through the book. Revelations start spilling every which way.<\/p>\n<p>So I just write this book backwards. Sort of. I got only part of the way through the denouement before I decided it was time to go back to the beginning and write forward knowing what I know now.<\/p>\n<p>Ah, the blissful expectations of the novice writer of old, who would sit down to the keyboard and envision doing a clean outline and just writing straight through to the end.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve had that happen a couple of times. A couple&#8230;in how many years?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve limped along since May or June on this book. It flew at first. Then&#8212;I swear it was two sentences. Break. Two sentences. Break. Erase two sentences. Write three. Break. That has been the progress for two months. Enough to make a writer tear her hair out. Usually I&#8217;d think I was distracted. Well, there [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":751,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/751"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4024\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cherryh.com\/WaveWithoutAShore\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}