Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Day 9

"Don’t be afraid to write down scenes or sections that don’t lead anywhere. Don’t discard them if they aren’t leading anywhere. Follow the advice of Joan Didion. She pins them on a board with the idea of picking them up later. Quite early in her novel, A Book of Common Prayer, she says, she wrote about Charlotte Douglas going to the airport. It was a couple of pages of prose that she liked, but she couldn’t find a place for it. “I kept picking this part up and putting it in different places,” she writes, “but it kept stopping the narrative; it was wrong everywhere, but I was determined to use it.” She finally found a spot for it in the middle of the book. “Sometimes you can get away with things in the middle of the book.'"

(reference: How to write a novel in 100 days or less - google)

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