Writing

Yesterday I started draft no. 4.  It was back in March, the 20th or so, that I took the final snapshot of the 3rd draft.

That means I've spent more than two months just preparing for this edit.  Given a limited sample size of just four chapters, I won't be done for 6 to 8 weeks, with each chapter taking an average of two hours.

When it's done, I'd love to write about the experience, but for now, I have to focus.  Time is as precious as ever, although holding together my fraying scraps of motivations might be more important.  Each step I take is new and presents challenges I didn't expect, straining my determination.

It's a damn good thing I enjoy it.

Why is that that vocabularies seemed so much better way back when?  When could be a hundred years, two hundred, a thousand, it doesn't matter.  Yesterday I finished reading a biography of William Tecumseh Sherman, who, like many of his day, corresponded regularly with letters to a large number of people.  It's because of those letters, and a memoir he wrote, we can see his broad and impressive variety of words.

I have no such vocabulary, nor do most people I know, but some certainly use big words with more regularity.  Of course, there are a lot of words that I use today that didn't exist back then (Sherman was a general of the Civil War), although I still feel somewhat inferior.  Maybe it's because we don't write as much.  Maybe it's because of TV or a greater selection of books, most of which are familiar and not written by Shakespeare or a Greek philosopher.  I don't know.

One of the things I love about the Kindle is the ability not only to look up words but also that it records those words I looked up.  Later, when there's a great word that I know will fit perfectly, but I just can't remember what it was, I can go back and find it.  I can't help but a feel an irony with technology like that.

Last week I started reading The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, Volume 1, by Edward Gross and Mark Altman.  Overall, it's a good book, but there was one quote that caught my attention because of its familiarity and suddenly making me feel less crazy.  

JACKIE COON FERNANDEZ

His way of writing was going to bed with the thought in his head of what he had to come up with, and then it was there when he got up. It was just there. He went from sleeping soundly to getting up feeling fresh, and it just came out of his fingers onto the typewriter and he just never had to think about it.

Jackie was referring to Gene Coon, a writer for the original Star Trek series.

Allowing my subconscious to do the heavy lifting has been my approach to not just writing, but other problems that need solving.  It might sound like "sleeping on it," but I think this is a little different.  It's trusting a part of you that is under no direct control to perform miracles, or at least it can seem that way when it works, which is more often than not.

Of course, I'm not popping amphetamines, but I'm not under Gene Roddenberry's whip either.