writerjenn

 "You want to winch the book out of your balky mind.  As the statue is entombed in the block of marble, the novel is inside your head.  You try to liberate it.  You try to get this wretched stuff on the page closer to what you think your book should be--what you know, in your spasms of elation, it can be."

This is Susan Sontag, in her essay, "Directions: Write, Read, Rewrite.  Repeat Steps 2 and 3 as Needed," from WRITERS [ON WRITING]: COLLECTED ESSAYS FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES.  I've never heard the process described so well.  And it's exactly what I was doing last night, figuratively hammering the marble away from the sculpture.  (At least, I hope it's marble.)  

I was working on a one-page scene.  I wrote and discarded pages' worth of drivel to end up with that one page.  The characters kept going off into long speeches about how they were feeling, and I would let them ramble and then chop it all out.  By this point in the novel, we can figure out how they're feeling, from much more subtle cues.  But I didn't know how else to write this scene except by the ramble-and-chop method.  Anyway, I have my one-page scene.

Are we having fun yet?  Yes.