Thursday, March 15, 2007

Space

Have you noticed that you seem to fill whatever space you have? If you have a cubicle, you fill it up, an office, it fills up, an apartment, into a house, stuff accumulates. Downsizing, now that's a different story, do you look forward to it, enjoy clearing the clutter, or does everything feel essential, whether it really is or not? I remember moving out of the house I'd lived in for twenty years, relocating to a new city, in an apartment. Traumatic because I'm a pack-rat. I nest. Now my office is cutting their overall space in half and everyone will be sharing offices, less space plus another person. Lots of angst.

We do the same with words, fill up the space we are given. Even if it's difficult and its a struggle, over time we fill it up. With writing, however, for it to be effective, we have to pick and choose at some point. Right now, I'm pulling out every word I can. I want to meet that word count. But on the next draft, words have to go so the story can fit in the best space possible. That means cutting loose favorite phrases in the name of clarity and tight writing.

For now, I'm happy to be meeting the word count and will continue to fill my 600 word space each day.

2 comments:

Rinda Elliott said...

I'll be cutting, too. But I'll mostly be adding. The last few chapters are nothing but the meat of the story. No setting detail, mood, etc. Okay, some mood. But some pretty cool stuff crept in there.

Carol said...

I will be doing some adding too, especially on the last chapters since I'm trying to reach word counts but mainly getting the meat. I will have to go back and add setting, mood, sensory etc.

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