Writer's Blog 2/11

So, for this first half of the semester in my fiction class, we have to do these creative exercises that are all mostly between 200-650 words. But I have a tendency to overwrite (to between 1100-2000). And then I have to downsize.
And my teacher had some good suggestions on how to eliminate stuff. But its methodical/could take forever, so I have to eye it up sometimes. And then, somehow…eek.

My last exercise was on an ‘absent’ character, that is, other characters had to give an impression of a character who does not appear in the story through dialogue, body language, communication, thoughts, etc. I originally wrote 1400 words. It had to be 400 words. It began as a story of mourning, a return to a gravesite on the dead friends birthday and the reactions it elicited more with the other characters and a certain amount of interpersonal conflicts between them and I was contemplating the possibility of making it trippy so the characters somehow had the experience of blinking in one place to find themselves in another of the past that infiltrates/confuses the present. It ended, after being edited, into being not much more then a lame cliché drug story, with people reminiscing about experiences of doing drugs and encountering police and gangs with said dead person--something that may be made interesting in a present tense if countered with some other kind of underlying/additional plot but in retrospect is just…dull, overdone, heard a million times, reminiscent in itself of a naïve time years ago when getting high was the most exciting thing rather than the same old thing that helps enhance more interesting/unique experiences that life has to offer…