Saturday, February 3, 2018

Same Process, Different Term

By
Scott D. Parker

I started my next novel on 1 February. And I was rusty.

I’ll admit it’s been a few weeks—months, really—since I wrote new fiction. I’ve been editing things that’ll be published later this year. And I’ve been doing some reading. Lots of it in January.

I woke up at 4:30am. Yeah, with a day job and a 45-minute morning commute, that’s my only time to write. The new book is the latest Calvin Carter, Railroad Detective, novel. I had the scene in my mind. I had conceived of it the previous day. It was a robbery of a stagecoach carrying a wad of cash. And the owlhoot had a very special method of pilfering. What could go wrong?

Well, the words arrived, they just arrived at a slower pace than I expected.

It's a general rule when you work out that if you don't exercise a muscle, it atrophies. The same is true for writing. When I was writing all the time last year, the words flowed and I was merely typing just fast enough to keep up. I expected that on Thursday morning. I didn't get it.

And that's when a term used in the movies came to mind. I actually uttered it out loud Thursday morning when I was getting ready for work.

“I'll fix it in post.”

Didn't immediately know where that came from but then it dawned on me. Earlier in the week, I had listened to Kevin Smith’s Fat Man on Batman podcast, specifically his interview with Armen Kevorkian. Armen is the special effects supervisor for the DC Comics TV shows on the CW.
Naturally, everything For which Armen is responsible takes place after principal photography is done. Literally post production, abbreviate as “post.”

We writers have our own post-production: when we edit. We all know that, but I had never thought of it as “post production.” Same thing; different term.

We merely have to trust the process and know any given writing day may not be perfect, but we must strive to move our manuscripts forward.

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