{"id":3032,"date":"2013-09-21T10:31:36","date_gmt":"2013-09-21T14:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=3032"},"modified":"2013-09-21T10:38:10","modified_gmt":"2013-09-21T14:38:10","slug":"write-and-write-and-write","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/writing\/write-and-write-and-write\/","title":{"rendered":"Write and Write and Write"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Franconia

Franconia Ridge, and a little perspective, 9.15.2013<\/p><\/div>\n

At the top of my to-do list, an ever-evolving string of reminders and chores, is the directive \u201cWrite and write and write.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s always the first item, at the top of the morning, a small, nudging cheerleader telling me three years into doing this full-time that yes, writing is really what I\u2019m supposed to be doing every day.\u00a0 Not in a half-baked, lazy way, either.\u00a0 Lots of it.\u00a0 No matter what.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll tell you what\u2019s daunting: sitting back from the mid-chaos of another major overhaul of a novel and finding you need to turn on the heat in the house because another season is starting and you\u2019re still working on the same book you were writing the year before.\u00a0 I\u2019m not talking about just tweaking a line or two in whimsical, polish-the-tines, touch-up mode, either.\u00a0 I am, yet again, writing entire scenes and acts from scratch.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Clunk.\u00a0 Head on keyboard.\u00a0 A writer friend of mine told me the other day he was abandoning a novel that he\u2019d taken to its third draft where it still wasn\u2019t working, and you know what my secret reaction was?\u00a0 Envy.\u00a0 He gets to abandon his novel<\/i>, I thought with longing.<\/p>\n

Then I laughed at myself.\u00a0 I would never give up this beast of a book.\u00a0 It is hooked deep into my marrow, and the truth is, even when the drafting seems endless, it adds up.\u00a0 This gnarly book is<\/i> improving.\u00a0 Each time I throw out another fifty-page chunk and patch in a new one, I can see that the new section makes better sense.\u00a0 It still isn\u2019t there<\/i>.\u00a0 It still hasn\u2019t arrived at the ball with all its slippers on, so to speak, but it\u2019s no longer a sniveling kitchen maid back in the ashes, either.<\/p>\n

We all write differently, I remind myself.\u00a0 Each book shows up differently, too.\u00a0 I wish I had better control of my discovery process for this novel, but evidently, I don\u2019t.\u00a0 The best I can do is write and write and write.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

At the top of my to-do list, an ever-evolving string of reminders and chores, is the directive \u201cWrite and write and write.\u201d\u00a0 It\u2019s always the first item, at the top of the morning, a small, nudging cheerleader telling me three years into doing this full-time that yes, writing is really what I\u2019m supposed to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[246,37],"class_list":["post-3032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birthmarked","category-writing","tag-project-next","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3032"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3036,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3032\/revisions\/3036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}