pod_together, poetree, and "The Fairest Of Them All": writing

[alexconall]

Gray-eyed Athena sprang completely formed
from father's head; oh, how it rang when she
was trying to escape, and how he sang
when she at last was free. A lovely child
was strategist Athena; she is quite
much like the poem discussed, composed by me.


Today I'd like to talk about how I wrote my pod_together project, "The Fairest Of Them All".

It wasn't as hard as it might seem from the length of the poem. I wasn't trying to rhyme much of anything; it would have rendered the story nearly impossible to write if I were. But it wasn't easy, either.

I initially tried writing this story in prose. That was failing spectacularly even before jjhunter told me (as I told you on the first day) that transformative work of public domain material counts as fannish for pod_together. But I did have that initial couple hundred words to springboard from when I got the bright idea of actually writing Snow White in hexameter.

Pretty much all of the writing happened in a spurt here and a burst there and a lot of complaining about how I should be working on "Fairest" in between. My all-the-words-this-year Scrivener project has six days with work on "Fairest" in the three and a half weeks it took to write it; on the final day on which I worked on the first draft, I wrote nearly eleven hundred words. Add to that the nearly nine hundred I wrote on the first day, observe that the first complete draft was only a little over twenty-five hundred words, and do the math.

I do not, for the record, recommend this as an approach to completing projects.

I do, however, observe that the day on which I wrote eleven hundred words was July 20, the deadline for poetree challenge #35. I really wanted to win that challenge. Deadlines, it turns out, work.

Comments

[kaberett]

Thank you so much for writing all of these up! I am really enjoying getting more insight into the process for you.

[alexconall]

Glad you approve!