Wednesday, January 28, 2009

a mammoth proposal

There is no worse writing assignment than a book proposal. They're not only tough to write, what with having to cram 300 pages worth of story and concept into a breezy 20-page essay, but they carry huge consequences. As in, if I nail this thing, I don't really have to worry about money for three years.

The only way into it, for me, is to trick myself into it. Lately that means setting aside 20 or thirty minutes, roughly the time it takes to stream a 1973 version of "Dark Star" on the Internet, to write a single sentence. Of course, the sentence comes out about 10 minutes in, and by then I'm into the song, so I keep going, just to have an excuse to listen. By the end, I usually have one paragraph and a first sentence for another.

Proceeding in this fashion, I've managed to amass five pages over the last two weeks. And today, after cobbling together a graph, I glimpsed a link to some stuff I'd written in an earlier draft -- several good, well-polished paragraphs. So I hunted them down and I cut and pasted them in. Now, I think, I am just days away from having a complete introduction. And once that's done, if past experience is any indication, the rest should just sort of fall together.

Until the close. That will be a fresh variety of hell.

4 comments:

Kansas Sity Sinic said...

you'll be just fine. promise.

Cazz Violet said...

So this means, when my students can barely churn out a paragraph during 75 minutes of senior English and it's driving me nuts, that they're actually doing OK???? Who would have thought it?

Joe Miller said...

Well, no, it doesn't count for bad paragraphs.

Charlie said...

I can relate. Somebody asked me for a script a couple months ago, and I just haven't been able to finish it. It's all storyboarded. A princely sum may await if only I finish it satisfactorily...

... and I can't.

Crazy, huh?