Mar 11, 2011

Twenty thousand words- I did it

Roland is celebrating for me.

Draft one of "The Friends of Henry Paris" is complete. Is it genius? Hardly. Is it coherent/cohesive? Occasionally. Did I write every word? You bet your sweet bippy I did.

The longest thing I've ever written and completed, My old record was around 30,000 words but it was only practically the beginning, and was so bad I'm going to pretend it doesn't exist.

This story I think has a lot of potential, it is very rough and inconsistent, but that's what first drafts are. I'm just grateful it's complete and now it's time for me to start rewriting. Since I've never been very good at revision, I'm hoping this class will do a good job teaching me the technique.

But I did it! I really did it!

For those of you who don't know or forgot or would just love to hear me explain it again, The Friends of Henry Paris is a novella I've been thinking about for something like 3 years now. I've tried writing it as a novel once before and gave up, I tried writing it as a screenplay once before and gave up, I've plotted most of it out several times but found it boring each time. This class made it possible/necessary for me to just plow through it and I did it.

The plot of Henry Paris is a good but not great one, but frankly I'm a bit tired writing it out, if you want to know you can go to glassofrandom and read the synopsis there from 3 years ago, (exactly 3 years ago, in 2 days, to be specific) it suffices me to say it's a Western ghost story/coming of age story/mystery and I don't care what anybody else says I'm proud of it, I wrote it, I did it.

Now to make it coherent...

3 comments:

Ammon said...

Congrats! That is a huge achievement, I'm very happy for you and proud of you.

What are you writing with/on? Pen & paper? Word processor on a Mac/PC? What tips would you give to the aspiring writer?

Austin said...

I usually prefer pen and paper, but this was all typed in Word. On a mac, but mac just because that's what was in the class I typed it on.

The best tips I can give is write, write, write.

There's a quote from I don't know who that says "I can fix a bad page, I can't fix a blank one." Write, then write, then... write.

Thanks for the congrats, I feel great. :)

Mark Beckstrom said...

Hooray for you. I signed up for nanowrimo script month.
Love to TLee and Moby.