While I would normally have updated the blog this morning, our neighborhood had a power outage. Fortunately, it only last about forty-five minutes. Posting on Facebook a number of people suggested writing out things by hand.
Sadly, my handwriting is so bad that even I can’t read it a few weeks after. I try when I know I need to re-read it, like for patient notes when I was still practicing acupuncture, but if I were to try and write a story or something of the like, I’d never figure out what I meant. That kind of writing goes fast. Half the time I have to go back and decipher what I meant to say when I was typing. Forgotten words, poor punctuation.
Dean Wesley Smith talks about writing clean first drafts. I don’t always. Sometimes the story is coming so fast I have to type as quickly as I can to stay with the train of thought. To me, that’s important. I can clean up the words and punctuation later, which I do after finishing the plot. I don’t spend a ton of time re-writing. Now and then parts need to be redrafted, particularly in the beginning if I started something one way and the plot takes it another but I rarely rewrite. I just add in the words I forgot and fix the punctuation as best I can.