Today, while I was proctoring an exam, I wrote the ending of Electric Boogaloo.
Let me back up - in addition to my day job as an attorney, I also teach for The Princeton Review. I usually teach LSAT prep, but today I was proctoring an SAT exam, which is always interesting because the people in the room are the people who I hope will one day read my books. So I view it as sort of research.
But I also view it as boring. The SAT takes approximately 6 million hours to take, and the only thing worse than taking it is sitting through it without having my whole future rest on it. There's not even anything at stake! (I'm sure the people taking it would kill me if they heard that.) Anyway, I usually take my computer so I can write during the exam.
Even though I am supposed to be working on TNP, I was in an Electric Boogaloo mood today, missing the characters, so I finished a scene in that manuscript. But after I finished that scene, I was sort of stuck. I've always known how Electric Boogaloo ends, more or less, but I didn't know how I was going to get from "here" to "there." But I didn't feel like leaving Electric Boogaloo alone, like I normally would when I get stuck, so I whipped out my trusty notebook and pen and started doing a little sketching (not drawing, sketching out of story ideas). "So this happened," I'm writing, "then this, and I need to get to here, but why is character S doing this and character G doing that" and then, all of a sudden, the exam beeper goes off and I'm 6 pages deep in the ending scenes of the whole damn book!
I get the students on to the next section, and dive back in, and before I realize it, I've got the last fifteen pages of the book done, more or less. DONE!
I'm not even supposed to be working on this book!
Of course, there's a whole big section of the middle missing, and this is obviously still a first draft, but I'm a little shaken by the experience. DONE! ::blink, blink::
I think it's because I've been writing so much lately. It's a little bit like training for a marathon, doing these first drafts. I've been writing as many days of the week as possible (usually four or five, because of my teaching schedule), and I've gotten to the point where I can do 2,500 words in about an hour and fifteen minutes. So when I don't write for a couple of days, it gets all bottled up inside of me, and when I have our and a half hours in front of a computer or a notebook with nothing to do but be quiet and tell people to put their pencils down, it all comes pouring out.
Still. DONE!
Let me back up - in addition to my day job as an attorney, I also teach for The Princeton Review. I usually teach LSAT prep, but today I was proctoring an SAT exam, which is always interesting because the people in the room are the people who I hope will one day read my books. So I view it as sort of research.
But I also view it as boring. The SAT takes approximately 6 million hours to take, and the only thing worse than taking it is sitting through it without having my whole future rest on it. There's not even anything at stake! (I'm sure the people taking it would kill me if they heard that.) Anyway, I usually take my computer so I can write during the exam.
Even though I am supposed to be working on TNP, I was in an Electric Boogaloo mood today, missing the characters, so I finished a scene in that manuscript. But after I finished that scene, I was sort of stuck. I've always known how Electric Boogaloo ends, more or less, but I didn't know how I was going to get from "here" to "there." But I didn't feel like leaving Electric Boogaloo alone, like I normally would when I get stuck, so I whipped out my trusty notebook and pen and started doing a little sketching (not drawing, sketching out of story ideas). "So this happened," I'm writing, "then this, and I need to get to here, but why is character S doing this and character G doing that" and then, all of a sudden, the exam beeper goes off and I'm 6 pages deep in the ending scenes of the whole damn book!
I get the students on to the next section, and dive back in, and before I realize it, I've got the last fifteen pages of the book done, more or less. DONE!
I'm not even supposed to be working on this book!
Of course, there's a whole big section of the middle missing, and this is obviously still a first draft, but I'm a little shaken by the experience. DONE! ::blink, blink::
I think it's because I've been writing so much lately. It's a little bit like training for a marathon, doing these first drafts. I've been writing as many days of the week as possible (usually four or five, because of my teaching schedule), and I've gotten to the point where I can do 2,500 words in about an hour and fifteen minutes. So when I don't write for a couple of days, it gets all bottled up inside of me, and when I have our and a half hours in front of a computer or a notebook with nothing to do but be quiet and tell people to put their pencils down, it all comes pouring out.
Still. DONE!
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