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Apathy! Thy name is writer!
Friday, May 21, 2004Yesterday this post was going to be about writer's block. Instead it'll start there and skew into me no longer having it, which I don't, even though I didn't actually write today. For the past couple of weeks I've been working on reformatting my hard drive, and dealing with other nonsense things. (If you've tried to get through to me, and failed, tis because I'm dowloading all the files my computer needs...) I've not written, or read, much...the reviews I write feel like I'm pulling my teeth out to make them, and the very thought of even looking at Water's Edge makes me want to sink down into a pile of boneless matter and wait until I expire of boredom. I've felt this way before, off course. And I've been reassured that the "took three hours and am sure I totally missed the whole point of the book" reviews read pretty much the same as the "20 minute, really feel a writing high because I hammered it" reviews. There are some people who claim to never feel this way. Apprently these blessed indiviuals sit down every day and write without worry, everything flowing smoothly, the planets and the stars in sinc, chi flowing in perfect rivers around them. I'm often inclined not to beleive them, of course. Or strangle them. Forgive me if you happen to be one of them...I'm very happy for you and, sincerely, would never, ever wish you harm for one second. I think the ones I want to strangle are actually those so smug in their craft, those people who can command words at will rather than paying their pints of sweat and blood. Those who, when I whine about not being able to write look at me and say, "Well, I always can. Just proves that you're not really a writer, doesn't it?" Perhaps they don't say it in so many words (though some have) but they imply it. As if just because sometimes you have to be drug to the keyboard rather than away from it, it means you are less dedicated, that perhaps you'd be better off selling car inshurance. This doesn't mean you don't desperately want to tell a story, or that you don't have so many voices in your head all clamouring for attention that sometimes you think you'll go mad. It means, quite simply, that there is something wrong with what you are writing. I'm sitting in the back of the car on another one of those drives my father takes because he can't stand to stay in the house after so many years of going to work every day. I'm writing this blogger post in my head, and then, I realize. "OH." I say out loud. A few moments pass. "OK. Ok, yeah, that'll work. That'll totally work." It may be a mark of my absolute inpending fruit loop hood that my parents don't ask me what I'm talking about. So now I'm no longer blocked. I understand what's wrong with my book, and, very shortly, I'm going to declare the several thousand words I've written the first draft, and start from the beginning, writing in new material, staggering the new information in with the old, rather than doing a straight (and boring) narrative. Boring, I say, because I lay it all out linearly....we do a lot of things, true, but we don't get to the main point of the book until 70,000 words in. That, my dear readers, is a book that is likely to suck dreadfully unless I take drastic meansures to fix it. Permalink Cindy scribed this at 5:28 PM 0 comments |