Shameless Whining. (You've been Warned)
Sep. 12th, 2005 04:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lenora_roseWell, last night I actually got some writing done on the story I'm supposed to be working on. Admittedly, it ended up msotly cut-and-paste, after I said to heck with retyping, as this particular scene just doesn't change much between drafts. Still, it progressed.
This shouldn't be noteable.
However, the last couple of weeks, I think this is the second time I've worked on the actual story at hand. Twice otherwise, I've made a great deal of progress on a variety of non-fiction bits, both for personal use and for Green Man (It's amazing how I always end up smack in the middle of three or four reviews with none wanting to declare themselves finished), but the novel has been sitting there.
That's my version of writer's block though. Not so much not-writing (Though there's been a lot of that, too) as jumping from project to project, working on anything and everything that isn't the supposed focus of the moment.
I can't blame the whole mess surrounding Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf, for all that's been occupying my attention, as this started a few days before that.
The thing being, I want to have this draft done in three weeks. Less than three weeks, now. I want it out of the way so I can focus on the story I'm workshopping when I go to Martha's Vineyard and Viable Paradise at the start of October. I'm more than halfway through; possibly more than two-thirds. Four months ago, though, I expected to be done before the end of August.
Which means I'm at the point where every word is crud. This time, too, that might be true. I restructured the plot, story, and even character arcs so much that, aside from a few cut-and-paste scenes like the one I just finished, it's all fresh writing. So I've allowed myself to leave open miles of plot threads and to write through interesting but probably unnecessary scenes, because it's changed so much I no longer know for sure which scenes will be the final core.
The disadvantage is, starting fresh means several of the scenes are right back down to first-draft level clunkiness in the prose. For all the dangling threads and wasteful scenes I've written, I feel the core story is better for the change -- but it's hard to see when it's obscured by the mess that is a Lenoran first draft.
So I hate the novel I'm writing. I still love the story beneath, but that just makes it worse, because I feel I'm making a hash of it, and thus letting down the story, the people within the story, and the potential readers who won't ever get to see the real thing.
They say every writer feels this way; and I've felt it before, I admit it. Just -- never this strong. Never this long.
Okay. Whining over. Next entry should be the finish of the Event report.
This shouldn't be noteable.
However, the last couple of weeks, I think this is the second time I've worked on the actual story at hand. Twice otherwise, I've made a great deal of progress on a variety of non-fiction bits, both for personal use and for Green Man (It's amazing how I always end up smack in the middle of three or four reviews with none wanting to declare themselves finished), but the novel has been sitting there.
That's my version of writer's block though. Not so much not-writing (Though there's been a lot of that, too) as jumping from project to project, working on anything and everything that isn't the supposed focus of the moment.
I can't blame the whole mess surrounding Hurricane Katrina and the Gulf, for all that's been occupying my attention, as this started a few days before that.
The thing being, I want to have this draft done in three weeks. Less than three weeks, now. I want it out of the way so I can focus on the story I'm workshopping when I go to Martha's Vineyard and Viable Paradise at the start of October. I'm more than halfway through; possibly more than two-thirds. Four months ago, though, I expected to be done before the end of August.
Which means I'm at the point where every word is crud. This time, too, that might be true. I restructured the plot, story, and even character arcs so much that, aside from a few cut-and-paste scenes like the one I just finished, it's all fresh writing. So I've allowed myself to leave open miles of plot threads and to write through interesting but probably unnecessary scenes, because it's changed so much I no longer know for sure which scenes will be the final core.
The disadvantage is, starting fresh means several of the scenes are right back down to first-draft level clunkiness in the prose. For all the dangling threads and wasteful scenes I've written, I feel the core story is better for the change -- but it's hard to see when it's obscured by the mess that is a Lenoran first draft.
So I hate the novel I'm writing. I still love the story beneath, but that just makes it worse, because I feel I'm making a hash of it, and thus letting down the story, the people within the story, and the potential readers who won't ever get to see the real thing.
They say every writer feels this way; and I've felt it before, I admit it. Just -- never this strong. Never this long.
Okay. Whining over. Next entry should be the finish of the Event report.
