Back in the Saddle

Now I'm done being sick and not giving a shit, it's time to get back to work. I've made it to thirty three pages of novel, and frankly, I can't remember where I put in that cute little phrase about how my protagonist met her husband. Woody Allen has a technique that might help. I learned it while watching the recent PBS documentary about his life, his work, and how he writes. That last bit - like a nugget of gold, received just because I had nothing better to do and flipped on the TV to see what was on. TV of course is mostly drivel, but once in a while I'm rewarded for maintaining my ongoing affair with it.

Well anyway, there's this thing Woody Allen has done from the time he started writing as a teenager. For one thing he still uses the same typewriter he's used for over fifty years. That in itself is interesting. Then, fairly early on, he takes all his hand-typed pages, cuts them into strips, then puts them in the new order he wants. Sometimes he adds in strips from lined yellow pads written in longhand. He continues to do this until he's done with the piece. Literal cut and paste. Or should that be literary cut and paste? Well, I guess that depends on how you feel about Woody Allen.

By writing something much longer than ever before, I'm learning that, after a certain point, it's hard to keep everything straight. I simply cannot remember where I put everything. Woody Allen is now seventy-seven years old. So I can learn from him how to be a semi-old writer. He doesn't plan on ever stopping and neither do I. Being semi-old means for some of us perhaps the memory isn't what it used to be. For me that's just business as usual. My mother said she had a memory like a sieve. Good image, and unfortunately her legacy to me. So I've been using tricks and mnemonic devices all my life.

I realize though, that if I use Woody Allen's technique of cut and paste, I can see all the pieces of the novel literally (the correct use of the word literally, thank you) laid out in front of me, something I cannot do while working on my laptop. The side benefit of cut and paste is being able to find things because you are reading them as you arrange them, you can sort them into piles etc. There is also something visceral about having your hands on all those pieces of paper and being able to lay them all out on a table, or even the floor.

Here's something I've learned while cutting and pasting, no matter the medium. It forces you to make a commitment to working out a lot of wrinkles. That segue from one paragraph to another that works when you have things in their original order, most likely will not work when you mix things up. Darn, and that segue was so brilliant too. This is not unique to cutting an pasting on the computer. Woody has to fix that stuff with his method too. It just goes with the territory of self editing.

Which leads me to "not getting too attached". You most probably will have to let go of some things, like a brilliant segue, to make the story work. Not getting too attached is a topic I've been meaning to write about on this blog. Did I do that already, or did I just think I did? Darn, I can't remember. Now I'll have to read my own blog (gag) to find out. Haha.

More later.