Finishing my first piece of creative writing

What a thrill I feel. For the first time, in perhaps ever (note decidedly Valley Girl tone), I finished a piece. It spoke from heart and the words fell on the page in a perfect reflection of way I saw it – well at least after draft eight they did! Before now, I have always taken on too much, fallen into the depths of the woods, never found my way out, eventually had to stop to deal with other pressing issues and never picked it up again (that’s my lengthy version of ‘I gave up’). But this first exercise demanded limits, and it made all the difference. 

The exercise told me to just write, but only for a very short time. It said 10 minutes, I cheated and took 30. But I just wrote, the words marched forwards, I did not look back.

The exercise told me that the final piece should be around 500 words (ok, I broke that rule too). I did not feel the need to sketch out a grand story arc, develop extensive character outlines. The narrow scope for the activity held me back from over complicating. Now I can understand how some writers can start with a short-story, and can then see their way to developing it into a book. Starting short lets you reach the end, filling it out afterwards is far easier when you know where you are going.

So my first draft was weak, and the time limit meant it was not researched. There was also a lot of repetition of adjectives. So draft two was about grammar (never my strong point!), Russian words and names, and a lot of delving into the Thesaurus.

The third draft saw me revisit the pace and structure of the story. So often I know what I want to say, but in my hurry to place it on the page, I am remiss to spell out every connection and salient detail that is crowding inside my head. For some writers leaving gaps is fine, do not spoon feed the reader everything, leave some space for their own minds to apply to the story. But I hate reading stories – short stories in particular – where the author sees no need to fill in every gap. When I am handed a literary jigsaw puzzle, I do not want it all put together for me, but I do want to know that I have been handed all the pieces. In this draft I also revisited balance. This final character Oleg, I did not like him, so I almost wanted to punish him by denying him the decency of a full description. However, this would have left the story imbalanced. So I added more colour to his description, but in a longer story I should add a lot more.

Looking back at the piece now, it is depressing. I do hope that I can feel senses of inspiration and excitement with the same fervor as I feel anger and pain. I know that I do come across such highs, but somehow it is those disturbing thoughts and images that loiter menacingly in the corners of my mind for so much longer. I have started making audio recordings on my phone of little thoughts, emotions, moments of clarity about how situations can be described. I should also record when I see or feel inspiration, and maybe capture that in my next piece.

My first piece of writing is in my next post.