I'm glad Spring will be here soon, beginning March 20th. I feel a lot of life/career/goal changes are in order.

In another area of change, which has me very excited, I'm side-stepping the current direction of a story I've been working on for several years. For months now I've banged my head at what has turned out to be the fleshing out of the characters' back-stories, essentially exploring the childhood experiences of my two main characters in an *undisclosed mystery title* book project. Trouble is, the more I went down that narrative path, the more lengthy the story seemed to deepen.

So right now I've made a decision to use these chapters (planned for use in the book's beginning) as a back-story, inserted here and there throughout the tale. At least for now, it takes away the pressure of going down that path and focusing on cleaning/revising the story I already put together awhile back.

This story refinement decision, thankfully, is somewhat due to reading some key excerpts in this year's 2010 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market. (Link points to Amazon.com) One chapter that helped me rethink my story direction is called, Looking Skyward & Other Exercises for Improving Your Craft, by I.J. Schecter. I love his illustration about the deligence of an athlete and a writer who practise continually, and how these are like a bag of pop-corn:

Both the basketball player's and the writer's range of skills can be viewed like a partially cooked bag of microwave popcorn. The fluffy, already-popped kernels represent things like spelling and simple rules of grammar--basic elements of the craft you easily master. Elsewhere in the bag there are some half-popped kernels and unpopped kernels--skills you're in the midst of developing or haven't yet tackled. Getting every one of the kernels in your writing bag to reach its potential demands a serious, ongoing commitment...

Another contributing writer, Jedediah Berry (author of The Manual of Detection) in the Writer's Manual book shares (referring my guess is to The Manual of Detection effort), "...the second half required a great deal of revision. 'An early draft of those later chapters veered deeply into back-story which, upon reflection, didn't contribute much to the novel.'"

When I read that, it dawned on me that a lot of what recently wrote was constructing back-story and that tale does not have to be fully laid out at least in a narrative sense.

Good stuff.