The Box from The Abyss Update, Stage 1 is 60% complete!

Note & Quick Summary: ‘The Box From The Abyss’ is not the working title of the story I’m writing. The Abyss is the name of the spare room we’re turning into a library/study/guest room. The Box is a box of notes I found while sorting things out. I’m attempting to make use of the notes in The Box and turn some of it into a 4000 words short story to be completed before 31st August 2012. Backstory here.

I mentioned before that I am an organized person. In whatever I do, I operate in an organized manner. As much as I admire people who are creatively and charmingly messy, I’m not that kind of person. I know people who sit down to write and finish whatever they wrote in a very nonchalant, debonair manner. I would love to be those people.

The unfortunate reality is that I am not one of those people. So naturally, I will be organizing my writing challenge.

I gave myself a due date of 31st August 2012, in order for it to be achievable and to accommodate my lifestyle (there is nothing I’m willing to give up in my present lifestyle!).

Well, turns out that the content of The Box was substantial enough that it could be mixed and matched perfectly. Writing has been a breeze up to this point and I’m up to 60% completion rate. Of course, considering I’m only writing a short story of 4000 words and not a novel of 50,000 words this might not even be good enough pace.

I won’t kid myself though. I’m concentrating more on finishing a rough draft of this project at this stage—let’s call it Stage 1--so the writing is pretty terrible.

“Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.” (John Steinback)

Also, I need to point out that I wrote the end of the story before I started. Why? Because I needed to move forward and this includes not allowing myself to reread my work. Once the story has been written down, I need to go forward and aim towards the ending that I wrote. I guess it’s not the best way to write since you need to develop the characters and scenes as you go, but keep in mind that I’m writing a short story instead of a novel. I think in a short story, this should be acceptable because you need to bring the readers from the start to the end without sacrificing quality…but you only have 4000 words to do that with.

With no re-reads, predictably there are a few holes in the story to be addressed  at Stage 2. It’s mildly science-fiction so some facts, double-checking and research is needed. I didn’t want to research it now while I’m writing the story because then I’ll get distracted. I don’t know about you guys but whenever I Google/Wikipedia, I get off-tangent. I’ll be Wikipedia-ing to find out whether a tomato is a vegetable or fruit and see links within that points to ‘nightshade family’. Then I click on it out of curiosity and within that entry find out there are such things as psychoactive species and within that entry find….and so on and so forth. I can easily spend the whole day on Wikipedia learning everything, and yet finding nothing that I intended to research about in the first place. Writing the whole story down and finishing it will give me my research parameters.

(Also, this was a very useful skill I learned from writing countless of academic research papers!)

No doubt it will also be full of grammatical errors, stunted flow, confused style…I’ll deal with that at Stage 3. I need to complete stage 3 before the 21st of August 2012.

And after 21st August 2012 I’ll forget about the story. Yup. You read right. I’m going to forget about it. It’ll sit there, untouched and unread for a week. 

Stage 4, on 28th August 2012. I’m going to reread the piece again and see if it make sense. See if the story is watertight. See if there are no more jarring errors in it. Between that and 31st August 2012, I’ll need to make sure that the piece is a job well done.

And only when I’m happy with it would it go to Stage 5: The Finished Product. Woot! :)