some notes from the land of writing and revisions - i am now in the finishing stage of the larger revision of my Masala Moments travel novel. and as so often, the final 10 pages are the most difficult.
while working on the revision, i copied some notes on revising that i came across, the first is from Twitter:
"Letter by letter, word by word, sentence by sentence, page by page. It's that easy to write, and that hard."and this one, from „Ways of Going Home“ by the Chilean author Alejandro Zambra:
"I'm waiting for a voice. A voice that isn't mine. An old voice, novelistic and solid. Or maybe it's just that I like working on the book. That I prefer writing to having written. I'd rather stay there, inhabit the time of the book, cohabit with those years, chase the distant images at length and then carefully go over them again. See them badly, but see them. To just stay there, looking."
those last words made me think: maybe the revision, and the time it takes to get those last pages together - it could also be connected to seasons. with the snowy and overcast winter days, the pages of Masala Moments take me back to the days there in India, under a sun that was so persistent that it seemed to be all-encompassing, reaching even through the sentences coming from there. and i want to just stay there, looking. until the sun is returning to the days here.
2 comments:
That's how I feel, but I couldn't have put it so eloquently.
Me, too. I guess for me it's also that a story-in-process can still change in unexpected ways.
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