Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Writing Front

Well, it’s been a week since I last blogged and a nice little reminder came from my dear friend Leah telling me it’s time. :-)

On the ‘real job’ front we got to write a radio ad for the first time. It was wild to see how much of my ‘writing life’ influenced the cutting necessary for the time slot. Now if I can only do that to all my writing rambling.

I’ve written about 2,500 words this last week. Not what I’d like to put out, but it’s a start. My life was chaos over spring break and I’m slowly starting to catch up. I’m about 18,000 words into it so I’ve got a long way to go and some major editing. I’ve taken two courses this spring and I have to tell you it was the best $60 I’ve ever spent.

Understanding and Crafting Sexual Tension by Mary Buckham and Empowering Characters' Emotions with an Introduction to her EDITS system by Margie Lawson. Both course are wonderful and have taught me SO much. Margie is doing a full Deep EDITS course in May and I truly want to take it, but I don’t know how much the ‘real job’ will let me.

So for now I need to keep writing and get the story fleshed out. Hopefully, I’ll be able to apply the wealth of knowledge presented to me in these two courses. I completely rewrote the first chapter and I have to say it is much better, still needs editing, but I can start seeing a light at the end of that tunnel. I think my CPs will be happier with me too!

Any writers out there that took a course that completely changed how they wrote? Or how they looked at writing and were able to move forward by leaps and bounds?

2 comments:

Leah Braemel said...

Those are the two best courses I've ever done - I use them for every thing I write. Margie's Deep EDITS course is really good, but you need to have the time to spend doing her exercises to get anything out of it.

And way to go on the wordcount - I've been CUTTING 2500 words, LOL! Not nearly as satisfactory. But *sigh* necessary.

Dani said...

On the Deep EDITS, I thought as much and May is pretty busy for me so I'll have to see. I think you can purchase a course packet. I may do that if I don't think I can handle the workload.

I know I will be crying on my cutting. There is so much that needs to be tightened. The producing is far more fun!