Writing  
 
I was so close to reaching my targeted word count for the corporate story yesterday when I decided that it was too staid, sounded too much like a Primary 6 composition piece, and decided to experiment with using an unreliable 1st person narrator.

Arguably I could have planned better and avoided this change, since it was something I was toying with doing after reading 'Japanese Tales'. But somehow it didn't occur to me to do it with this story, now, 3 days before I'm supposed to send it out. Augh.

Reading

Read 'Write Before Writing (1978)' last week, apparently a classic chapter from 'The Essential Don Murray'.

It was part of work, and these were the questions we had to answer:

1. Please select a thought / idea / phrase that interested you in this chapter and share with us why you found it interesting. Does it affirm something you already believe in? Do you disagree? Why?
2. Murray describes four 'pressures' that move writing along. Which of the four is your personal push factor? How does it influence what you write and how you write?

These were my answers. 

1.  The sentence 'The writer who starts to write a solemn report of a meeting may hear a smile and then a laugh in his own words and go on to produce a humorous column' (p34) resonated with me. Writing NOMs can be strangely inspiring (sometimes). I also found the idea of genre exploration interesting -- I recently heard that in order to break the rules of writing, one needs to know the rules of writing. I think there's the same for genres. In order to subvert a genre, you need to understand the features of a genre.
2. Definitely an approaching deadline. I wrote 1 short story in 2 years because of the Law of Delay (such a great phrase!), but ever since I have writing submission deadlines, I find myself setting my alarm at 2 am just to plough through a story. A deadline forces me to focus and to push myself to experiment within a limited time frame.

Completely feeling number 2 now.