The Beauty of Ugly Prose

Got on a nice roll this afternoon with my novel--had a blast with two scenes in particular. One scene I'd been wanting to write for days, but wasn't sure how to do it 'til mid-way through, and another one that came to me out of the blue--well, out of the blue and searching madly for a way to meet my word-count target.

It was great, the kind of rush you get when everything's firing just right. I loved it. I was having so much fun, it was almost perfect.

But oh man, honestly...both scenes are nasty. It's gonna take me hours to edit them into something acceptable. Strange thing is, I knew it at the time. "This is crap, this is garbage. Whoo-hoo!"

It's this messy pile of goo, pablum, fluff and nonsense. But for now, they're done. For now, I like them.

I've never been a big rough-draft kind of guy. For better or worse, when I wrote papers/essays/etc. 95% of what I typed made it to the final. I tended to be that way with my fiction--and now that all I have are self-imposed deadlines, I wouldn't get very far insisting on near perfect drafts. This is pretty freeing--focusing on a word count, a completed draft, a deadline. Nice thing is, I'm actually going to have something done for a change.