Mysterious Distillation
“For the first time I felt a kind of entitlement—I am entitled to tell this particular story in a way no one else can—which is a kind of power.”
- Amy Hempel
Like end of summer flowers, time be the wave that washes through days of concentrated effort. If a writer is fortunate, work is assembled—a jumble of first-passes; a collection of notions which presented themselves somewhere along the initial flush of creative vision. Combine these with gorgeous, beautifully complete snippets of text which arrived fully formed, dictated from a complex source which dares reveals itself in fragments—all of this and so much more is forced into one folio and labelled “The First Draft.”
Progress of an emerging manuscript unfolds & we are certain to soon realize the essential function of editing. This initial cooked-up manifestation seems to breathe on its own and incubates until eventually tested to see whether or not there beats the pulse of a living novel. The same imagination which served-well to generate a framework for an emerging story is now elevated and required to distill raw material; to judge merit and utility. Sticky, liquid streams of words must be condensed and cleansed of repetition and redundancy. What has been recorded must now be amplified, but where to begin?
Is it clever and Zen to begin on the first page, with the all-important opening line, ready to pounce and carve anything which sounds out of place or fishy to where the novel is trying to reach? A random approach might work better— just dive in wherever the cursor stops and work out from there. Would the more intuitive method guarantee a fresh, objective pair of eyes? It might help to keep somewhere in mind that what is being re-read is never as brilliant or wasteful as we may suspect. The first pass through a baby novel is emotional territory– feelings of elation intercept waves of dread and a great deal can be deleted in a sudden panic of shame.
...
Read the full article, “Mysterious Distillation,” by returning guest writer Meredith Lorimar (@violetflamed) later today on The Official Prose. Blog at: blog.theprose.com/blog.