Writing – The Saga Continues
I meant to try a new hobby this week, but I got so wrapped up in typing up and editing the pages of my old story that my husband found, that I never got around to it. I suppose that’s what is supposed to happen when you find a hobby that you really connect with.
My Sidetrack This Week
I wrote this story over a decade ago and while I remember the general storyline I was going for, I had forgotten most of the details. Reading through it was actually a little surreal; it was my handwriting, but I don’t really remember writing the words it and I had forgotten so much it was like reading it for the first time. I actually caught myself a couple of times going “ooh, I wonder what happens next”. Sadly, there are sections I remember writing that are now missing (probably lost on the hard drive of a computer long since gone).
It was interesting to see how my thoughts for the story changed as I went along, the crossed out lines, multiple character name changes (I think they all changed at least once), the different color inks. This is something that is hard to recreate on a computer. Sure, you could use the track changes feature, but it’s somehow just not the same.
The Rules of Writing
Whether it was intentional or not, I actually followed some of the rules of writing.
- Use an outline:
- At the time I had definite ideas of where I wanted the story to go and certain events that should happen and had made a couple of notes (an outline of sorts). Also, Looking through the notebooks, I found sections written out of order. I’d get hung up on the details for one section so I’d move on to another section that I had a more clear idea for. Exactly the reason to use an outline.
- Write at the same time:
- Most of my writing was done in the evening, sitting in my car, waiting for my husband to wrap up his class (he was teaching an evening computer course at the time). It’s not nearly as uncomfortable as it sounds. We lived in Southern California at the time so the weather was nice and I’m short so I had plenty of room to make myself comfortable.
- Just write, worry about editing later:
- I found misspellings, oddly worded sentences, and plenty of other grammatical errors. That’s a good thing becaue it meant I didn’t keep stopping and interrupting my train of thought to fix those things.
- I love spell check and Grammarly, but I let those colored underlines distract me and will stop mid-sentence and fix them rather than just letting my fingers fly and going back at a more appropriate break time to fix them.
While I didn’t really try anything new this week, it was good to give my writing and typing muscles a little bit of a workout. Maybe after a couple of more weeks of working on it, I’ll be brave enough to share an excerpt on here. We’ll see.
