Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Lucy's Island - FINI !

Just wrote the final paragraph of "Lucy's Island" - finally. This story has been in my head for a looong time and I thought it would flow onto the paper without any problems, very quickly. As I stated in previous blog entries, "Lucy's Island" was supposed to be a short short (that means a really short story - about 3000 words), a simple exercise in dialogue between two people whose relationship is unclear. But ah, not so. The more I got to know these characters, the more I wanted to flesh them out, make them real, explore their backgrounds. I yearned for them to be able to reveal their motivations and inner feelings, something very difficult to do using dialogue alone -- at the risk of sounding contrived and unnatural. After many weeks (ok, months) of tweaking, rewriting and changing the storyline, I ultimately created an 11,000 word monster that I'm not sure has any relevance in the publishing world.
Now I've got to come up with a better title...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Congratulations, Wylie! Isn't it exciting when a story seems to grow itself. :)

Wylie Kinson said...

Thanks, TL!
And yeah, it is pretty amazing how the characters literally come to life, invade your thoughts and haunt your dreams, begging for their stories to be told.