New Year, New Writing Project

Writing About Writing

 
Awareness of the outside world. For your amusement. Desktop Stables: A Tiny Barn. A toy barn for dolls. That’s right, 1:144 scale. Not only does the blogger construct this wee thing, she makes doll-sized dioramas of the process. Amazing.

The world is still serious. Sometimes you have to take a break.
~~~

My greatest dressage challenge and how I overcame it

 
This is my new writing assignment for USDF Connection.

More money. Yay!

More words. Double yay! I was always agonizing over all the good bits I had to leave on the cutting room floor.

More space, writing-wise. Triple yay!

The previous assignment, Behind The Scenes, was a series of first-person statements. What I do. How I got started. That meant direct quotes. [Clips]

Here’s the inside pool. Vanishingly few of us talk in complete narrative. In 32 years as a journalist, I have had it happen to me twice. It was weird. The rest of us, myself most definitely included, converse in sentence fragments. Our verb tenses migrate. We start a thought, wander off, circle back.

Because of this, I would beat my brains to jelly assembling the best possible narrative with only the words in front of me. I did this every two months for seven years. I stressed myself out each time.

The new gig is third person. Here is Jack. Here is what happened to Jack. Here’s how Jack feels about what happened. Snappy pull quotes? Awesome! Bring ’em on. If not, I can explain what happened. I can take this part of the story from over here, attach it to that part from over there, and bridge the transition with a few words of my own. I can cite an outside source if appropriate.

This should be more work but less stress. At least, that’s the plan. We’ll see how it goes.

Onwards!

Stay safe. Stay sane.
Katherine Walcott