Kim’s final Monday Methods post for us.
Monday Methods – Continuum
At the beginning, there are only words. They don’t necessarily relate. Like a pile of excitable puppies, they fall all over each other, tumbling out and racing around with too much energy, not enough focus.
Adjectives aplenty! Adverbs gone wild! The craziest euphemisms you’ve ever seen!
Then, as the words progress, they start to fall into patterns. Fragments cohere and make sense. They start to move together, find their rhythm, and the words become sentences. There is no story yet, but there is motion. A pulse begins and the first signs of life flicker between the letters.
And then, at some point, the words and sentences begin to breath on their own. This moment of quickening isn’t a sudden revelation or a lightning strike, but more of a gentle recognition by the author that this are more than a mere clutch of words; ideas lurk below the surface. There is meaning. There is direction.
The sentences become rivers with strong currents, pulling the writer towards a conclusion. It may be a horrible ending, a boring ending, a sudden ending, an ‘it was all a dream’ ending, but it’s still an ending and that’s okay. With patience, stubbornness and perseverance, that first babble of random gibberish has travelled along a line to coalesce into a hero’s journey. The author might not be able to point to the exact moment that chaos became order, but it doesn’t matter. The first draft is complete.