Writing is Obsessive

This morning I read a tweet from an SCBWI colleague, who posted (at midnight) that she was in bed with her manuscript. And I understood completely, since I was up too early and pondering the same book mapping exercise that she is undertaking. We're all slaves to a homework assignment posed by Cheryl Klein, editor extraordinaire at Arthur A. Levine books (and she of Harry Potter continuity editing fame). I ordered a copy of her book Second Sight on revision, and it has once again been a paradigm shift of an exercise (and I've only just begun). I guess that is the good thing about revision. Every time I think I have the ms done, I'm back to the drawing board. But the book gets better every time too which, after all, is surely the point.

Reading Like a Writer

So, I figure I'm a well-read person. I have been reading for a long time, and I teach literature, so it's all good.

But just when I thought I was out of world-changing paradigm shifts (the last two being: motherhood, and film literacy, which forever changed the way I view visual media) along arrives another. For the first time ever I am reading and re-reading fiction from a writer's perspective. It goes something like:

Speech marks, moderately long sentence minimally punctuated, grade level vocabulary, attribution tag not necessary because of context, a short paragraph to punctuate the last three longer ones.

And at the same time, all that lit-crit stuff, like: plot, conflict, characterization, description, rising action, etc.

I've never read for chapter length before. Or how many turning points a middle grade plot can sustain. It's like The Matrix! It was there all along and I had no idea. So after decades of reading, I've finally logged my first full year of reading like a writer.