Tuesday's Inspiration - The Creative Cycle via Sue Grafton #MFRWauthor

Last week, we looked at the first three steps of this cycle, now we'll finish the remaining ones.

First draft. For me this is the rough draft and often finds me traveling along the road I've planned for the story and discovering part way along my planned story that it won't work. I may not have figured out my characters or some other problem like too much plot. What I do then is just begin again and write as fast as I can to push past what ever blockage stopped me the first time. Often much of what had been written can be saved with some tightening or some twist in the path I hadn't seen before. Like Ms. Grafton, the writing continues until I have what may look like a hodge-podge of material but the story is down and then comes the fun part.

The next step in the cycle is revision. What Ms. Grafton speaks about is making the mind a blank and looking at this as though you weren't a writer. As I start this, little ideas and twists show me where something must be taken out or what must be expanded on. There's nothing worse that reading a story and finding a scene that the writer wimped out on and didn't play the entire drama out. Do I miss some of these on the first revision. Sure but on the second or third or as many times as it takes for the story to feel complete I usually pick this up.

From here the cycle turns to completion and this means a clean copy and a final read- through for me. This means for me things like Italizing sentences, changing the opening or closing of a paragraph but really leaving the words as they have evolved.

Now comes the end part of the cucle. For Ms. Grafton, this means submission, followed by elation that the story has been finished and wonderful. Second thoughts follow making the writer wonder if the story is really good. For Ms. Grafton comes the dormancy stage. For me, I usually have a story that's been pushing to emerge and thus the cycle begins again.