{"id":3052,"date":"2013-09-27T10:07:43","date_gmt":"2013-09-27T14:07:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=3052"},"modified":"2013-09-27T10:16:53","modified_gmt":"2013-09-27T14:16:53","slug":"learning-from-that-writer-i-knew","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/birthmarked\/learning-from-that-writer-i-knew\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning from That Writer I Knew"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Birthmarked,

Birthmarked, First Draft, 2.13.2008<\/p><\/div>\n

I went back to my very first draft of Birthmarked<\/i> this morning to see how it opened, and I was surprised by how decisive and certain it sounded, especially since I know I was making it up at the time.\u00a0 The draft was in single-space, which also surprised me because I write in double-space now, and this drew my eye to the size of the paragraphs, which were short, and the white space that flowed around them.\u00a0 The prose already had a distinctive cadence that would remain through later revisions.\u00a0 Altogether, I thought it was a pretty good opening, and I really wished I knew how I had pulled it off.<\/p>\n

Then I scanned to the opening of my current novel, fearful that this one would be a total dud by comparison.\u00a0 I shifted it into single-space so I could read it at a normal pace, and bam.\u00a0 It works.\u00a0 This one is a novel, too.\u00a0 It\u2019s different from Birthmarked<\/i>.\u00a0 The voice and the setting and the problems are different, but as a reader, I believe this book will take me somewhere I want to go. \u00a0As a writer, I\u2019m reassured, even hopeful.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s tricky being a reader of your own work.\u00a0 I\u2019m intensely critical of my writing, and I sometimes fear I\u2019m making mistakes by throwing out perfectly useful chunks of scenes that might have been salvaged with the right tweaks.\u00a0 I do, rarely, put bits of deleted scenes back in, sometimes in new places, so I know to keep the cuts in an extra file.\u00a0 But I also feel a certain click inside when I read a section that\u2019s good.\u00a0 I trust it. I want to put my hand in that storyteller\u2019s grasp and go with her.\u00a0 I forget that the book is mine.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not the same writer I was five years ago when I wrote Birthmarked<\/i>, but I can still learn from what I did then.\u00a0 From a practical standpoint, I\u2019ve already made a paragraph shift in my first page to adjust the visual pace.\u00a0 More fundamentally, I can remember to trust myself.\u00a0 I wrote that book and two more in the series.\u00a0 I ought to be able to do it again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I went back to my very first draft of Birthmarked this morning to see how it opened, and I was surprised by how decisive and certain it sounded, especially since I know I was making it up at the time.\u00a0 The draft was in single-space, which also surprised me because I write in double-space now, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[246,37],"class_list":["post-3052","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-birthmarked","tag-project-next","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3052","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=3052"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3052\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3064,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3052\/revisions\/3064"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3052"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3052"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3052"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}