When it's good, it's very good...

The way the story seems to come out is unpredictable. Sometimes it feels hopeless, almost torturous. Sometimes a first draft is just the vaguest possible idea of an idea. And when I read it back, it's obviously crap. These kinds of drafts go in one of two directions. The first direction is that they get thrown out. The second direction is that they get revised, added to, things get moved around in them, new ideas--each one like flower blooming in a sparse garden--sprouting up, being sketched and then painted, a step at a time.

Much rarer is the first draft that is born whole, in need of very few revisions, or at least where a large section of it comes at once, from nothing. Of course, it doesn't really come from nothing. It comes from a lot of things that have been building up in my head for days or weeks or even months (and sometimes years). But then without a lot of struggle, it's just suddenly popped out. Those are the times I love writing the most. Those are the times when I know that this is something I need to do.

It happened last night and I can see in the events of the past few weeks, what forces made it happen. I wrote the second to the last chapter last night, or at least a good portion of it. I had been thinkng about it for a couple of days and had some good ideas when I couldn't sleep at 4 a.m. Marc wasn't home in the evening and I was writing. I got stuck at one point, but I allowed myself not to obsess about the sticking point, skipped over it and wrote on. I always feel like an emotional scene is working when it makes me cry as I'm writing it. I am kind of a drama queen, but good books and good movies make me cry and unbelievable and bad ones don't. The only dilemma with this in a person's own writing is making sure that what the writer is getting out of the writing is what a reader will get out of it.

Anyway, I am taking it to writers' group tonight and having read it aloud to Marc last night, I know that I am going to struggle not to cry when I get to the sad part.

I was wishing it was easier to get to that place in my head, that it wouldn't be such a rare occurrence. Well, coincidentally today Jon posted something on the MFA student caffe board about a book that I think might be helpful. So I ordered it. It's called Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. It's a book written in the thirties, but the feedback about it makes it seem like it's the perfect thing to help a writer get inside her own head. Just the ticket.