What Wipers and Writing Have In Common
I finally got around to changing a wiper blade on my vehicle. It’s about two inches shorter than the old one, but it clears the windshield so I can see. That’s all that matters.
Writing is the same, especially your first draft. It’s like a snow-covered windshield. You can’t see where you’re going but you know you’re going somewhere. Sometimes, things get clearer when you wipe away the ‘snow’ in your brain and rethink your work. The first chapter of “Der Reizen” took about five starts to get done, plus a bazillion edits along the way. It took four “snowfalls” to get me to change the wiper blades on my mental windshield. Some stories are like that.
One of the first things I learned about writing was to jump right into the action. I didn’t do that with the first four tries of “Der Reizen”. I wanted to start at the beginning until I realized that no one wanted to know about how she got to Bavaria until after she got there. They wanted to know what happened when Herta got there first, be jumped right into the action. Once I got that figured out, everything else seemed to fall into place.
The story isn’t perfect. It’s as perfect as I can make it at this point in my writing career, though. It’s about two inches short of perfect, but that’s okay. It made things clear enough that I could write four more books to follow it. And that’s all that matters.