Verbose Workouts

I'm an unfortunate product of the flash fiction generation which no longer feels the need to spend five paragraphs itemizing the petals on each daffodil in that meadow which has nothing whatsoever to do with the story you're about to read, but which the author rhapsodized about anyway, so your English teacher has something to jump on and attribute metaphorical meaning to when you're forced to study said author's 'classic' prose years later (these days we just praise terse writing for the complexity in its simplicity - much like the critique forthcoming from the judges on Masterchef - and all's fine and dandy until you step over the invisible line into the mysterious area where things are suddenly pronounced 'too' simple, a principle which Zen masters beg to reject).

That sentence had over a hundred words in it, in case you're wondering. And as is often the case when I'm encouraged to ramble on rather than succinctly state my point, it may be fun to read, and grammatically quite sound, but you & I are both left feeling I could have done the job in about 10. 'It's weird dragging out stories when you don't need to.' Yup, done.

I'm gradually overcoming my natural instinct to get straight to the point and finish the story (while not getting sidetracked with the pfaffy asides I've a tendency to fall back on. And remembering that overused brackets are annoying, even to me).

I practiced with short stories and opinion pieces for the last couple of weeks, pulling at both ends of each thing I put down, like I was making pizza from scratch. And today, I finally felt the idea of the novel I've been carrying around widen itself into more than a one-line summary with some accompanying bullet points. 

I have a structure now, and it doesn't feel forced in theory, though time will tell. I wrote three chapters today, which I quite like, but will have to go back and completely re-write tomorrow, since the first chapter is ridiculously rushed - it reads like someone's being frantically clever for the drummer with the pada-bing flourish at the comedy show. I am my harshest critic. But it's coming along. 

The characters seem like individuals now, rather than Frankensteined jumbles of various people whom I'm cramming together to make a point which doesn't need to be made. I could possibly see myself emailing this to someone I know in real life some day, and being okay making eye contact with them when we meet in real life afterwards.

I think it's safe to say that at this point, I don't run the risk of filling space with empty words, or letting punctuation help me procrastinate any more. The only challenge left now is to streeeetch. 

I doodled this for the blog because I was too tired to sleep, and thought I had no words left. Silly me.