Thoughts on the two versions

It's interesting how having an assignment influences writing, sometimes for the worse. The first version of Drill was written with nothing much more in mind than telling the story and illustrating the point in the frame, that simulation isn't a complete substitute for real experience. There's enough detail, I think, for readers to understand the point of the drill.

The assignment that got me re-writing was this (as best I can recover it from my notes):

Assignment. Something you know a lot about and write to show others. Scene, dialogue, feelings, narrative.

That's approximate, but close. But that and reading the original piece to a friend got me thinking that I needed more of an explanation of the steering system and led to all the detail in the second version.

Along the way, I looked at the alternate writing assignment:

What do you feel strongly about? What experiences lead you to that. Be specific.

I realized that I could be doing both assignments, although "strongly" may be an exaggeration. I'd already decided to drop the frame and I was trying to find a quotation to start. I didn't find the one I was looking for but I did find the one from Confucius that seemed on the money. In
fact, it made the old title work even better.

But, when all is said and done, I think the new version is inferior to the old version: too much explanation, really -- enough to stall the narrative. And it wouldn't have been there without the assignment.

That's often the problem with workshops and classes: they produce work that fills an assignment but that are not worth being published.

Evasion

As I wrote earlier, I reactivated this blog as a place to stash various things connected with my activities with the Community Writing Center . For reasons that I'll discuss later, I decided to rewrite Drill for this workshop and I handed the new version out Thursday with a pointer to the old version here on the blog. It would be interesting to know how many people actually come here to read it. I hope they leave comments, if only to show that they were here (hint, hint).

I'm going to post the new version next but I'm avoiding talking about it here until I get reactions from my workshop mates next Thursday. I don't want to contaminate those reactions because they are important to me.

On the other hand, I have no reason to believe that anyone will get here from the workshop (or anyplace else). This blogging often feels like putting messages in a bottle. ("Fan mail from some flounder?")

Sea Stories

Sea stories have a point. They are not mere narrative. Drill may have started as narrative, though.

I've been trying to figure out when I wrote the first version. It's type-written (probably on my old Olympia portable) but on sheets that have perforated edges -- like the old sort of computer paper. The frame makes we wonder if I wasn't connected with Evans and Sutherland when I wrote it. Kind of subversive if that were so.

If so, I would have written it in the early 1980s. My memory is a little hazy about when the events took place. At the end of the first Med deployment -- since I didn't come home from the second -- so somewhere in the range 1964-5. The destroyer in the story is an Adam's class DDG. The picture is, in fact, the original, the USS Charles F. Adams, DDG-2.