Back to the blog

It was a bit alarming to come back to my blog after a long, long break, and find I had once written a post on a story I’m still working on, and what’s more, to discover that the first paragraph of that story hasn’t changed since then. It seems to be my way to spend a lot of time writing a story. Well, maybe that’s because I have a full time job, a family, a house to take care of, you know, the usual things. Plus there was a pandemic. That slowed things down a bit.

But truthfully, I am the kind of writer who takes time over a story. I find I need to write a good portion of the story out before I even know the characters well enough to make a plot, and then of course I have to go back to the beginning, because once I have a plot in mind, the scenes I’ve already written don’t always fit with it. It’s not a very organized or efficient way of working, but I don’t seem to be able to work any other way. I have friends who make elaborate plots before they even put a word of the story on the page, but I don’t seem to be able to do that. It’s the words on the page that make the thing real to me, that give it texture and movement and character. So, back to my slow progress. At least I still like that first paragraph.