Indulge Me
Aug 8, 2008 by rilla
Some of my co-workers/co-writers talk about our job as part of "some sort of crazy creative writing experiment." We've all put our heads together to come up with a storyline and character development, and we've even established themes that we want to emphasize and the kinds of metaphors that want to use.
Then we cut the outline up into bite-sized portions and each of us have to... erm... consume? our own pieces.
That metaphor sucks.
Basically, we all write a small part of a larger whole. Even though we all know how the plot is supposed to reveal itself, we each have our own ideas about how those plot points will be best created. Tomorrow is the deadline for everyone's writing assignment and I've just about got ants in my pants about what the first draft will actually read like. Will it be a giant mess? Will it actually showcase a diverse writing style in one lovely text? Will it look like five different sections slapped together with no apparent purpose or continuity? Really, it could be any combination of these things and it likely will be a giant mess. But I totally cannot wait to read what everyone else has come up with.
I kind of feel like I've put some puzzle pieces in place for what could be a lovely picture, but I want to know whether my puzzle pieces actually fit with everyone else's or not. I'm terribly excited. I'm so excited, in fact, that I've spent the morning trying to get work done even though I have nothing to work on. Talk about your make work projects. I'm writin' e-mails and reading through old documents, but there's really nothing left to get done until everyone else finishes up their parts.
Some days I wonder whether this will forever be the pinnacle of my job experience. I think, "I will never have a job as cool as this one is." But that's not necessarily true. I think about the kinds of opportunities this "crazy writing experiment" will open up for me, and I am filled with so much hope and happiness.
Then we cut the outline up into bite-sized portions and each of us have to... erm... consume? our own pieces.
That metaphor sucks.
Basically, we all write a small part of a larger whole. Even though we all know how the plot is supposed to reveal itself, we each have our own ideas about how those plot points will be best created. Tomorrow is the deadline for everyone's writing assignment and I've just about got ants in my pants about what the first draft will actually read like. Will it be a giant mess? Will it actually showcase a diverse writing style in one lovely text? Will it look like five different sections slapped together with no apparent purpose or continuity? Really, it could be any combination of these things and it likely will be a giant mess. But I totally cannot wait to read what everyone else has come up with.
I kind of feel like I've put some puzzle pieces in place for what could be a lovely picture, but I want to know whether my puzzle pieces actually fit with everyone else's or not. I'm terribly excited. I'm so excited, in fact, that I've spent the morning trying to get work done even though I have nothing to work on. Talk about your make work projects. I'm writin' e-mails and reading through old documents, but there's really nothing left to get done until everyone else finishes up their parts.
Some days I wonder whether this will forever be the pinnacle of my job experience. I think, "I will never have a job as cool as this one is." But that's not necessarily true. I think about the kinds of opportunities this "crazy writing experiment" will open up for me, and I am filled with so much hope and happiness.
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Sounds like you found a pretty cool way to make a living. Can you get me a job doing what you're doing?
t.: The big hope and dream is that our book will be popular enough that we can move on to writing the next once. I'll let you know if we need to fill holes in the team.