Musing on Writing

I went down to Starbucks last night to write the second chapter of my novel (many of my writing projects get finished there) but it just didn't work. I wrote five pages, but unfortunately those five pages encompassed three aborted attempts to open the chapter. This is where I miss my laptop. On computer, I would have copied, edited, re-arranged sentences and paragraphs, and probably have mashed out a chapter. On paper, I had all these sheets lying around with different ideas - it was a lot of rework. I am going to try again tonight on my home computer.

I think some good came of this (besides all the interesting ideas I generate from the exercise). My first chapter worked well, and flowed, as I knew exactly the point or focus of the scene - the point was to introduce the main character, and the lens used was a pistol duel at dawn. For my second chapter, I obviously did not have my focus properly worked out - I was just writing for the sake of writing. So I am going to attempt to extract the one main important theme or idea, and once I have that, just write the scene with that angle in mind. It should then just write itself.

We'll see