Day 2.
The struggle begins. Can I interject here how tired I am of people saying "the struggle is real"? It's ubiquitously applied to stupid things. There aren't enough donuts. Is the struggle real? It's a small quibble, but I think there's just an over saturation of the phrase at this point. Like the "said no one ever" or "keep calm and..." campaigns of a few years ago.
I am not sure what to post already. That's a good sign. Yesterday I sat down to the computer to work on my novel and immediately enjoyed that fickle stage where everything except writing seems interesting. Facebook wants checking, texts are coming in, you remember suddenly that you intended to google how to make your own pizza dough, etc... I did finally nail down and work on it, but the changes felt primarily cosmetic. Fixing language or names and not addressing the real inner workings of the chapter. This current chapter of A.N is taking me into a massive adjustment phase of the plotting of this book.
First, I should say that this novel has been so much fun to write. For years - I mean like 20+ year - I have had a fantasy trilogy in my head that spilled out into notebooks, maps, and filled binders. I have several huge folders overflowing with information on this fantasy story. One year for NaNo, I thought "Yes! Let's finally write this bitch!" I managed to get my 50k words, but only cultivated boring, repetitious chapters of too-similar situations and managed to turn some of my main characters into amoral sociopaths. I came to the realization that this beast I had created was too much for me, as an inexperienced writer, to wrangle. I had no idea how to tell the story and tell it well. Still don't. It is one that I may have to revisit down the road.
So my next venture was to take a seat of the pants approach, with a concept I had, but hadn't fully explored. Let me tell you, it was exhilarating to write. Being unbound by the years of planning and themes I had crafted for the other allowed me to really explore the insane world I was creating. The vibe of the book is a very 80's sci-fi film with a dash of mystery thrown in.
The subsequent drafts have ramped up the difficulty because, while I have a manuscript, it is so problematic. Character arcs have needed work; pacing and structure have both been issues. Please refer to my inexperience with storytelling on this large of a scale. Plus, keeping track of all the plot threads throughout a novel, the consistency of world building, and a murder mystery mixed into it... The piece is ambitious for me.
If there's something I do well it is to allow inspiration to scale my ambitions. That doesn't mean I create a lot of ambitious things - usually it stalls projects instead because I fall prey to the idea, "Yeah, this is neat, but wouldn't it be cool if..." Often it results in overcomplicating something otherwise straightforward. I'm working on balancing this, because I don't believe it is inherently bad, I just need to understand what is manageable and what isn't.
Anyway, today I get to go back and tackle what I worked on yesterday, but here's the annoying clincher: when I finished yesterday, I knew it wasn't right and that the easiest way to fix all this was to start the chapter over. So my cosmetic changes were largely a waste since I will be tossing the chapter and rewriting it completely today. I have to move some events from later in the book into this portion. It fixes the flow and allows for a better ramp up to the ending (I think... here's hoping my writing group agrees with me).
The more I wax on about this, the more it is making me anxious to keep writing here instead of on A.N. so that's all she wrote for today!
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