“…and the living’s easy.”
Yes, the calendar might be stuck in May, but for we denizens of library labyrinths and hushed classrooms, the end of finals week is call for celebration: often intoxicated, always loud. In Madison, Wisconsin, this period—during which the winter children are shuffling out, and the summer folk are filing in—is observed with electronic revelries and a superfluity of red-tinted Solo® cups. No other color will do.
Sleep, I hardly knew ye.
I want to get some writing done. Since I finished Day of the Oyster last fall, Lady Time has found a near endless stream of tasks to consume my story-telling energies. Some of them were artistic and relevant to my future: I designed this website, registered numerous social accounts, launched this blog, and wrote a short piece of historical fiction for class. And there were a lot of necessary chores: I applied to UW Madison and wrote a brimming kiloliter of dull scholarship essays. Dull to write, anyway.
Good news on that front: I was recently offered a full-tuition scholarship by the University of Wisconsin–Madison for the 2014 school year. I didn’t apply for this one, so you can imagine my surprise!
I still have a lot of scholarship applications outstanding, and I remain hopeful that they will fill the gaps in my living-expense budget. Regardless, I now have adequate funding to return to school full-time and concentrate entirely on my studies and writing. I am humbled by this opportunity and deeply grateful to the Phi Theta Kappa Honors Society and the Kemper K. Knapp Scholarship Fund for making it possible. Words fail to express my excitement.
I also found a new apartment, a few blocks closer to campus, and will relocate this August. My partner will join me there, and I look forward to seeing her more often.
And, yes, I want to write!
I plan to start rewriting Day of the Oyster in June. I sprinted through the first draft with one eye on the finish line. I’m proud of what came out, but there are some dead zones and duct-tape monstrosities. The same might be said of any rough draft, but the pace I set to finish this story rendered more warts than usual. I believe I can fix any structural issues with a single rewrite and spruce up the prose with a second. That’s as much time as I’m willing to invest in a single story pre-edit.
The biggest challenge will be controlling length. In two classes last year, I had to prepare a reading for a set time limit. I also wrote a video game review with a set word count. Restrictive exercises, but I believe they will prove invaluable this summer.
Writing with a limit is tough—pretty sentences turn to dross, pet paragraphs and thought trains fall as chaff before the Cap Reaper. But what’s left is lean, and better for it.
By bending the backbone of a piece under a cap, I learned to see the essential, to become intimately acquainted with the exact words, sentences, and paragraphs that made the story work. With the skeleton bare, I more clearly saw the non-essential, the luxury flourishes, the opulent adjectives. Once I identified what could go, the process became simple—if painful—elimination.
To anyone who writes from an outline, these revelations might appear sophomoric. I, however, am a free writer. My outlines serve a nebulous capacity, existing primarily to chart story beats and help me with quality control and foreshadowing. In other words: I make this stuff up as I go along. I like having the freedom to put two or three characters in a room-in-my-head and watch what they do, hear what they say.
Working with a word cap doesn’t fundamentally change my process. It functions like a timer, makes my characters speak succinctly and clearly. And it keeps me honest during the rewrite process. I plan to cap all my future works, though I would like to work with a more forgiving word limit than the micro-stories I’ve been writing. Make room for a few indulgent adverbs.
I’ll be interested to learn if the mix of essential to non-essential components changes dramatically with a longer piece. My working hypothesis is that it will not.
More updates as they occur. I’ve been developing a comic book on-and-off for the last few years, mostly during the summer. Maybe something concrete will emerge this year. I intend to look for some paid writing gigs, too, maybe generate something towards those living expenses.
As for today... School is out. Clock silent, calendar shut. The door is open. Yellow light, summer breeze.
Pass me down that cup.