So, is there a writing life after Clarion?

I am a member of a weekly writing critique group that meets on Wednesday nights (currently), so once Clarion was over, I still had a regular writing deadline. This particular critique group is where I'm working on my novel -- I bring in one new scene each week. I've now written enough of the novel to get to that point where the scenes that remain to be written are either "bridge scenes" that connect the major ones, or they are the major scenes I've been postponing either out of dread or waiting for that moment of inspiration to strike.

My first critique group meeting after Clarion (Wednesday the 1st of August), I was dreadfully uninspired, so I worked on a bridge scene for which was the third part of a three-part sequence. No sweat... which means, of course, there was no real electricity in the scene, either. This is how it goes, sometimes.

I took advantage of the day and typed in all seven scenes I'd written prior to Clarion that hadn't yet been typed in... I'm one of those guys who often hand writes with a pen and paper. Over two thirds of this novel was written longhand, with the remainder being originally composed at the keyboard.

After typing in all of those scenes and the new one, my word count on The Do Over is 87,000 words. Woo-hoo!

Once again this week, I found myself in the middle of the day on Wednesday with no idea of what scene to write for critique that night. Once again, I decided to write a scene that follows one in a predetermined sequence. In this scene, the young lovers were just about to be interrupted by the parents. My plan was to show how calm, cool, and collected our protagonists were under fire, and how they escaped detection by the parents with grace and panache. (Which is not to say they escaped consequences....)

Then, I remembered something that Nalo said to us during Clarion and something that has been echoed frequently around the critique table lately: GO THERE! Go where the tension is. Get your characters hip deep in it and follow them as they try to wade their way out. Don't avoid the conflict... go there.

So, I went there.

As soon as I decided to favor tension over easy resolution, this scene practically wrote itself. It was delicious. Alas, now the scene has ended at a cliffhanger, and I have still at least one more to write before this sequence is done.

That's okay. It was fun to go there, and I look forward to returning there next week.

Had it not been for this weekly commitment, I have no doubt that I would not have written a single scene for The Do Over between the end of Clarion and today. I just haven't been in the mood. Luckily, schedules aren't interested in your mood, so I wrote because I had to write. And, now I feel like I've broken through some barrier and I'm back in the groove.

Within the next few days, I'll have to come up with a plan for how I'm going to finish the project. I'd like to have the first draft done by the end of September, but I'm not sure how that's going to happen. I'll strategize this weekend.

In the meantime, there is one other issue with the project that demands attention: the name. I had several Clarion instructors recommend changing the name. In my feedback from the PNWA contest submission, all of the remarks were very glowing (yet I wasn't a finalist. Beh.) except one of the two judges indicated a desire for a better title.

Should I change the title? If so, to what? Please let me know your thoughts! (Post a comment on this entry or send e-mail to me via the link at the bottom of this page.)

:-)

Thanks!

--Allan