Saturday, March 15, 2008
Write, Erase, Rewrite
I started using my local library lately, stealing away 90 minutes three days a week to plow through writing on my next book, The Noir Album: On Life in Multicultural Paris. With two kids under the age of 3 around the crib, it’s the only way this book will get done before the year 2020. My all-time favorite scribe Toni Morrison said a few times in Conversations With Toni Morrison that it’s all about the rewrite (absolutely anything you write is merely a first draft), and she’s write… uh, right. Click here for a 1,000-word section of the new book that I decided to cut completely recently; my book changed direction a bit and I rewrote the entire section. At this point, I’m writing The Noir Album to answer a core question: can blacks in France exploit their own unique culture as a commodity to improve their socioeconomic standing here, in the way that, say, black Americans have used hiphop culture to our advantage? This excerpt is a light take on my first impressions of Paris back in 1994, but I ultimately dropped it to start from scratch.
madeleine at 3:34 PM on 03/20/08:
I know this is a pretty lame comment, but I just had to say thank you for posting your writing schedule online…it feels like I work so much, that I can’t imagine carving out any more time, but seeing that you just set aside the time…and then leave the house helped me establish my own parameters.