Lists

Some people are born list makers and some definitively are not.  I fall somewhere in between. 

I like to make a list then buck it; or avoid making a list, thinking I can keep this, that and everything else in my head.

The truth of the matter is there are some instances where making a bonafide list is truly necessary.

Otherwise I go into the grocery store for lemons, milk, asparagus, dill, and artichokes, and I come out with ice cream, cookies, potato chips and baking soda.  Then we have no vegetable side dish for dinner.

In the case of working on my manuscript, I found, I had a good editing list 'in my head', but I wasn't doing the editing.  It became daunting knowing I had to look for, and keep in mind this variety of 'to dos' as I read through the manuscript.  So what I actually ended up doing was nit pick editing the first 20-30 pages over and over again, getting hung up on a comma or a sentence, or a preposition.  Then let two weeks go by, until I hit my writing group again and could sit there for three hours and look at the same 20-30 pages over again.

So, when I was at writing group yesterday, this suddenly dawned on me.  I mean, it wasn't really a new concept.  I had been vaguely aware that I was preventing myself from doing the real work that needed doing for a while, but I saw an honest to goodness bluebird out the window, which set me dreaming about the edges of things, because they live in edge forests by open fields. The next thing I knew, I realized, I had been on the edge of my manuscript for months now. 

So, yes, I KNEW what I needed to do, and it was plenty the more I mulled it, so I decided to write it down.

First I wrote down the chapter headings, made a list of all the chapters, like a table of contents without the page numbers.  While I was doing that, it occurred to me that I could combine a couple of these short chapters into one in a few places, which would simplify a lot, really. 

Then I made a list at the bottom of that which looks like this:


Working on:


~ continue to edit Joe out/Mike into Thanksgiving and Observatory scenes

~write observatory scene using A. H.’s notes

~pay attention to name changes for T. B. and T. N.

~characterize supporting characters more through action and physical description

~make ‘thought bubbles’ action scenes or move them to more fitting scene

~ edit down cooking relevance

~more on comets

While it still covers a lot of tasks, some quite involved, to see them written down is so much less confungulating (hybrid of confusing and confounding and frustrating my non-writer Honey came up with, which I love!) than when I was trying to keep them in my mind. 

This way I can separate out the tasks and work on them, one at a time, and maybe fix a few of those name changes along the way. 

What a concept!  And to think I used to counsel my tutorial students to do exactly the same thing in organizing their much shorter papers.