the writing life, chapter three.

so this chapter was actually a ton of fun and made me lol many times.
my reflections/notes!

• i think i see this in everyone's reactions to their stories, but nobody ever wants to revisit the story. it's like a dead person. we want to move on.
• writers merely recall the real world. this leads to spinoffs, leading to fiction, yay.
• as i wrote in the margin of page 46, EDITING IS HARD, YO.
• you must be in the right mindset to begin writing. if you start too soon or you don't have in mind what you're going to do, you will fail miserably.
• once you find out what you're writing, celebrate. you deserve it.
• take breaks--you will need them. but then when you come back to writing, be aware that the piece will be very wild and hard to handle. you'll have to hit the ground running to catch the train.
• there is no way that you will ever get exactly what you want on the page. you never tame the idea, it tames you. and then it screams out through your fingers. and then you shape it to make it look beautiful and then you hand it off, bedraggled and scruffy, to the world, hoping for approval.
• when we write, we adjust the writing not to the original vision, but to the surrounding words.
• don't aim to capture the exact vision and idea. aim for the right words to express exactly what you want and then hope for some semblance of your original plan.

now, my own personal experience with this. my story came woven intricately with real life along with just a silly conversation that i had with kayla regarding the recession. i realized that the word recession has the word "recess" in it, and we had just dropped mira off at her internship so we decided that it would be Great Fun to imagine if the Great Recession was just really this huge era of recess. yeah. and then my mind connected it to recess in terms of courts. then we thought that the Great Recession would be the equivalent of The Longest Recess and thus my story was born. we originally decided for the two lawyers to have had a falling out in high school and restart their friendship during the case. this vision didn't make it onto paper though... the complete story that resulted had a lot more of me in there than we had originally planned. also, i didn't start writing it immediately after that conversation. i waited... about a couple weeks until it was bursting through my fingers and i needed to start writing it otherwise my fingers would move but the writing would never make it to paper.