Plotwise I have the big picture but must fill it in with lots of little pictures. I am so out of practice and mentally distracted by work that I have a hard time picturing it. That makes it a struggle. My thought processes are visual. I'm not good at remembering intangibles or processes or flows of relationship from my life such that I can inform fiction. All I really have to work with is pictures. Probably my outlet should be music and video rather than writing, I don't know. Not an acceptable excuse this month.
Was all excited when a good subplot occurred to me with which I could move things forward. Shortly I realized this highlighted the fact I never studied literature, else I wouldn't have felt like I thought of it myself. Also I would have thought of it sooner and more often.
No time to read. I feel as though I should have read a LOT more books in my life. I don't even have a favorite author. The few I've read enough to form an opinion of all have some major flaw or other, and I don't remember the rest.
When you write, can you get lost in it, and then translate that alternate reality through your fingers, across the screen and into storage? When I was a child, writing gave me the opportunity to get lost in fantasy. For awhile I felt if I tried hard enough, my fantasy world would become more real than the world I wanted to escape. So I wrote and wrote and wrote. It didn't work: reality remained real. Eventually I had to make concessions to reality -- dropped in and out of college, had jobs, started getting acquainted with other human beings -- and over time lost that ability to get lost in the fantasy.
But good writers probably don't get lost in it either. It's a matter of marshaling mental resources and discipline and productivity -- like a job. But a job flexible and free, at least, for the luckier ones.
So this struggle with writing productively without being able to get lost in it is part of the growth needed to become a writer. I get that. I get that the inability to escape is inescapable.
But does that have to make it so hard? :-)
4 comments:
Nanu Nanu.
I DO get completely lost when I'm writing well. Which is why I'm not writing well or at all. Feels all pinched lately. I can't afford to tumble to far.
Think I'm gonna drop out and run away to Bermuda.
I could never get lost writing the way I can reading. How could you think it was real if you were the one making it up?
The closest I can get is occasionally losing track of time and the dogs and my cup of tea, and being able to write for a good long stretch without looking at the clock (or in November, at the word count) and wishing I could take a break now.
Writing is painful.
No kidding. By the time I got to the ice cream threshold count, it was ten thirty. Should not have ice cream so late at night. Note I said "should", not "did".
I like the chart graph thingie! It is painful for me this time because I don't have a goal in mind the way I did when I was writing romance or even last year when I was adding to my old novel. Short stories are tricky. Betcha poetry would be worse though ... no way I'm doing NaPo.
Post a Comment