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| Photo Credit - Jan Bowman - April 2013 |
Starting on July 1 – my intention
is to write a complete new draft story with a beginning, middle and end each
month. It doesn’t have to be finished or perfect, but it does need the
structure of three basic parts. In particular, I intend to draw from many
partially developed stories from my dream notebooks, and as I think about the
beginning and ending, perhaps I will be able in the subsequent meditations to
seek a way to organically end with an image or gesture that somehow touches
upon the internal and external conflicts. I intend to dedicate at least 10
hours each week for the first draft. So at
the end of a month, what will a story look like after 40 hours? I don’t know yet, but I am willing to explore
this and report back.
At the end of the month,
I hope to use the same process for the first round of revision. Then I plan to
leave it for a while and let it cook slowly at low heat until it is ready for
another round of revision or perhaps a peer review/feedback session with
another trusted writer friend. While that story is in the slow cooker, I
intend to work on another one.
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| Photo Credit - Jan Bowman - October 2012 |
I hope to continue work
on revising older stories at the intervals over each week when I am not working
on the new story. Yes. This is an
ambitious plan and likely to unravel a bit – since life has a way of
interrupting even the best of plans, but I intend to try.
“It is the time that
you’ve wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupery
About Jan Bowman
Jan Bowman’s fiction has appeared in
numerous publications including, Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo
Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others. Glimmer
Train named a recent story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short
Story Awards for New Writers. Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award,
her stories have been nominated for Pushcart
Prizes, Best American Short Stories, a Pen/O’Henry award and a recent story
was a finalist in the 2013 Phoebe Fiction Contest; another was a 2012 finalist
in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is
working on two collections of short stories while shopping for a publisher for
a completed story collection. She has nonfiction publications in Trajectory
and Pen-in-Hand.
She writes a weekly blog of “Reflections” on the writing life
and posts regular interviews with writers and publishers. Learn more at www.janbowmanwriter.com or
visit blog: http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com
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