Ugh. Writing troubles.
Mar. 5th, 2006 06:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
opera142Had all day to write, how much did I get done? About 3 sentences. Grr. I'm about 3/5th of the way finished with "Crows", and normally, 3/5ths done means writewritewritewriteyay!write. Not this time.
Images and words are not coming. Not even in tiny flashes. I can't even get tastes of words.. you know, where you're stuck on a description but you know you want a word that starts with W or something polysyllabic to balance the rhythm of the sentence or an adjective that sorta, kinda goes with the mention of being cold and sickly in the 1st half of the paragraph.
Very frustrating. All this wonderful time to write and I'm wasting it. I'm going to be kicking myself all day at work tomorrow.
So, anyways. For posterity, I made a list of reasons why I think I'm blanked.
--the stuff I have written is excellent. Sentence after sentence to be proud of. I think that's causing me to freak over quality. I want the next sentences to be excellent too. Which is inhibiting free, creative thinking. Which is bringing production to a standstill.
--vanilla sex between two characters I'm not really that into in that way.
-- a lot of what's missing-- the 2/5ths-- is either the uninteresting, but necessary stuff: transitions, the getting off of shoes, or the way-too-easy-to-get-way-way-way-overly melodramatic stuff: reactions to getting blown, the afterglow. Both give me trouble ordinarily; this time they've given rise to The Panics.
-- I made a point to minimize the banter in "Crows", and banter/dialogue is a big crutch of mine. Can't figure out what the characters might do here? Give 'em a couple lines of funny dialogue to mask utilitarian action. The characters I'm using banter a bit, but neither of them are big talkers so I limited myself to one exchange (which has already been used). Writing outside of habits is HARD.
Images and words are not coming. Not even in tiny flashes. I can't even get tastes of words.. you know, where you're stuck on a description but you know you want a word that starts with W or something polysyllabic to balance the rhythm of the sentence or an adjective that sorta, kinda goes with the mention of being cold and sickly in the 1st half of the paragraph.
Very frustrating. All this wonderful time to write and I'm wasting it. I'm going to be kicking myself all day at work tomorrow.
So, anyways. For posterity, I made a list of reasons why I think I'm blanked.
--the stuff I have written is excellent. Sentence after sentence to be proud of. I think that's causing me to freak over quality. I want the next sentences to be excellent too. Which is inhibiting free, creative thinking. Which is bringing production to a standstill.
--vanilla sex between two characters I'm not really that into in that way.
-- a lot of what's missing-- the 2/5ths-- is either the uninteresting, but necessary stuff: transitions, the getting off of shoes, or the way-too-easy-to-get-way-way-way-overly melodramatic stuff: reactions to getting blown, the afterglow. Both give me trouble ordinarily; this time they've given rise to The Panics.
-- I made a point to minimize the banter in "Crows", and banter/dialogue is a big crutch of mine. Can't figure out what the characters might do here? Give 'em a couple lines of funny dialogue to mask utilitarian action. The characters I'm using banter a bit, but neither of them are big talkers so I limited myself to one exchange (which has already been used). Writing outside of habits is HARD.
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IMHO--
Date: 2006-03-06 04:16 am (UTC)To hell with style, details, rhythm, imagery, and le mot just. Just relax and tell the damned story in broad, crude strokes first and get it out of your head. THEN you can go over it with a fine brush and get all the colours right. You're expecting yourself to do it all perfectly in one draft. (I know you don't think you are, but you are. I say this because I have a tendency to want to write that way too, and I see precisely the same symptoms in your writing posts.)
Re: IMHO--
Date: 2006-03-07 01:17 am (UTC)I don't care so much about perfection on the first go 'round. Half the fun of re-writing is turning passable into fantastic. It's getting the passable written that's killing me. I'd be thrilled with not-even-close-to-passable at this point.
I've got a dead head right now. Zero imaginative thought happening. And considering my imagination usually zooms around at 100 mph, it freaks me out.
Re: IMHO--
Date: 2006-03-07 04:28 am (UTC)It was a sunny day. Bob and Geraldine, or maybe her name is Amanda, met in a coffee shop and hit it off because they share an interest in some obscure hobby, doesn't matter what. But on their third date, Bob found out that Geraldine/Amanda was in fact underage. But OMGTHEIRLUVISSOTRUE! so they had to sneak around for the next six months until her birthday, and then they started flaunting it. That got on the nerves of Geraldine/Amanda's secret lesbian lover, Patsy, age 36, blond hair, green eyes, exotic tattoos. She started sneaking around to spy on Bob and Geraldine (maybe Amanda would be better after all), and accidentally found out Bob's dirty secret: [insert dirty secret here later], then used it to blackmail him into cheating on Amanda so Amanda would dump him and go back to Patsy's loving, if pathologically jealous, arms.
Let your first draft look like that. Then you can flesh out what happens in the coffee shop, what they have in common, what happens on their first two dates to show that their love is true, how it comes out that she's underage and why it didn't come up earlier...
You see what I'm getting at? If you can't do passable, pretend you're six years old and writing What I Did For My Summer Vacation.