B is for Brilliance

 B is for (Oh) Bother  Brilliance

Unless you are someone triply blessed by the divine (divinities? Elizabeth Gilbert's genie in the corner of the room?), the first draft(s) of written work often leave as many words on the cutting room floor in edits and revisions as make  it to the finished page in the final draft.  Most of us are not Alexander McCall Smith with a (consistent and)  successful 1500 word morning writing session today that gets published in the newspaper tomorrow, no further editing required. (*paraphrasing from a brilliant brilliant talk of his I heard a few years ago; of course the 30 seconds of pure demoralized hate-rage from a room full of wistful, wishful writers that followed these comments is also a pretty brilliant memory)

Amazing, blessed writers like that aside, most of us are more in the category of Kristin Cashore (who was awesome and brave enough to show pictures of what the draft stages of her book BitterBlue looked like with its seven original notebooks, followed by an eventual complete start over from square one) or my friend Intisar Khanani (who shows me some of her middle drafts and faithfully compares her final discard word count to her finished novel word count to see which one wins) whose fourth book The Theft of Sunlight just went out into the world.  As I am still in the "seven notebooks" stage of drafting my work into coherent stories, this is quite inspiring. Perhaps I too can one day pull a finished draft out of the morass of notebook page words... And perhaps so can you!

In the meantime, write on blog world friends. Only 24 letters to go.