The Ohio Series – The danger of Old Words — long, rough day, not a lot to show for it

So I was over two thousand words for the day when I rolled down to Old Words on the page.

Old Words on the page will hurt you. They’re things you wrote before you backed up to insert a better idea.

And my better idea was big, and good, and I had a helluva lot of fun writing it the last bit of last week, and yesterday, and today.

But when I finished today’s words, I hit the slab of Old Words at the bottom of the page. Read them.

And discovered that I could either have the new, better story, or the old, less good story, but both scenes occurred during the same time with the same characters, and took the story in two different directions.

The old direction was nowhere near as good as the new direction, and the words could not be salvaged for another project.

They simply did not make the cut.

So I cut them.

Which after hours of work during an otherwise brutally stressful day left me with a net gain of 834 words.

On the bright side, I get to write more tomorrow, and there are no more slabs of Old Words lying around to cause me pain.

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By Holly

Novelist, writing teacher, on a mission to reprint my out-of-print books and indie-publish my new ones.

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Stephanie
Stephanie
3 years ago

Love this! Its my daily conumdrum.

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