A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Five-Hundred-And-Fifty-Six

I had a rather successful evening in terms of my prose.  In working on the non-fiction, I chose to explore some more personal content, discussing my reasons for writing this piece and relaying aspects of my own history that are relevant.  It is a very different direction for the piece to take, in some ways, but I think it is important and is offering a lot of context for the rest.  If nothing else, it is very clear this is important as a way of uncovering my own thoughts around the material.  I believe it is important to include this in the piece, but even if I am wrong and it winds up cut from the book in the end, I know it is providing me a clearer insight about my motivations for this work, and also expanding my perspective around the subject in a way that is helping me to think about some of the more challenging and complicated issues that I am addressing in new and helpful ways.  

As well as having this breakthrough on the non-fiction side, work on the new novel went quite well.  I was working on a piece that could easily have been bogged down in specifics, but pushed the impulse aside and instead focused on using the moment as an opportunity to push the story by introducing a new character.  This wasn't a big thing, obviously, but it was me starting to push away more from the real life aspects of the narrative.  I need to focus on making things happen that are more relevant to the story, I realize, and I am realizing that some of what I wanted to balance that against is not important to the reader.  It is only my own knowledge and experience that makes it seem interesting and relevant.  It is possible to gesture at the real aspects, I think, rather than getting bogged down in them.  They are, for the most part, not actually relevant to the story, I am realizing.  It is when I let myself step away from that and focus on building up the characters and putting things into action that things start to take off, and tonight I found myself really entering that space. 

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