Writing in a Fugue

I’ll tell you what: this whole just write the next sentence/don’t bother to heavily detail beforehand is simultaneously awesome and confusing. I keep forgetting what I wrote! It’s bizarre not to know at every point exactly what has happened in the text I’ve already written, because I didn’t go over every piece of it in my head fifty times before actually writing it out.

It’s also weird to think that, for all the time I’ve had this story and these characters in my head, there were really only a handful of moments that I actually saw in advance. (Actually, I think what it is is that fully half the scenes I initially conceived got scrapped for one reason or another, mostly that the hero turned out to have a slightly different personality than I thought.) So, that’s confusing and requires a fair amount of re-reading to get myself caught back up if I take more than an hour in between writing sessions.

On the other hand, it’s kind of like I’ve become my own John Malkovich and created these bizarre trapdooors that let me see into my own mind as if I were someone else looking in. And that is totally cool. Damn, I’m weird.

Anyway, another week in which I failed to engage my narrative particularly often or particularly well. My ataraxia continues. I am trying to find patterns for when and why I can or cannot write. My prior belief that the only way I can guarantee a certain number of writing hours in a week is to do it before work is being validated. I will probably make the effort to continue to write in small spurts at other times, which will be a change from my old system of ”if it’s not first thing it’s not.”

So, yeah. Back to JK Rowling-ing it, it is.

Writing Strategy Update: a Week of Fail

I had a great start to my write-a-lot-of-little-snatches experiment last weekend. I managed to keep the momentum up through Tuesday over my lunch break. Then I just got slammed with a series of evening events and busy days at work and cases of the after-the-day tireds so bad I didn’t even remember I’m writing a novel, much less attempt to work on it.

This weekend I tried again, managing to accomplish about 3K of words with very little time spent “writing” that wasn’t actual words onto screen. So, in the sense of words-per-minute-at-my-document, efficiency is up. In terms of overall words produced, about standard for me on a weekend that I am not doing anything else particularly, but also one that I did not particularly devote to writing.

The story is over 18,000 words now, about a quarter of the way done based on my initial word-count projection. The place I have reached in my rough outline jibes with that, as well, so I feel good.

A quarter through does mean that I am about to enter the mushy middle third. At least this time I should be able to entertain myself with the sexual dynamic between the couple, since this is a story that starts with marriage rather than leading up to it.

A surprising refrain has popped into my head when I feel stuck – just write the next sentence. Not one of DWS’s more helpful aphorisms, on the surface, but yet…it is in practice.

I am also taking another piece of DWS advice and stating (to myself) a particular thing that I am practicing with this story. This time I am practicing pacing, how to keep from getting bogged down in endless detailed scenes. For some stories that’s appropriate, but not for all, and this one has enough events that I want to get to that I don’t want to waste time moving at a molasses-like crawl. Perhaps, as well, having actual events in the middle instead of extended set-up will also help keep that part from going so slowly.

Remains to be seen. Tomorrow I try anew at writing in short bursts at lunch and after work. Expect in another week a post hissing about how awful the middle act is, how I can just scrawl “Lucifer Emerges” over that part of my outline, how I am treading water in a stagnant plot-lagoon, etc., etc. But for today, this story is cruising and me with it, and I am pleased.

Mud: Chekhovian Storytelling at Its Most Detrimentally Obvious

Saw Mud. On the whole well worth watching, but the ending was disappointing for me. More than that, the way the end came about was so obviously foreshadowed as to be obnoxious, and gave me a different perspective on storyboarding. Before I get into that essay, however, a quick overview of the film.

In case you don’t know the premise (which I assume is based on a Primus song, making it even more badass from the inception):

The Good: Fabulous directing that matches what he did in Take Shelter. Acting jobs that to a (wo)man lived up the hype being made about them. The movie was a wrenchingly realistic depiction of life in the rural South–both my husband and I walked out feeling like we had just watched a movie based on an alternate reality of our own childhoods–unlike, for example, Beautiful Creatures (which I am still convinced was written, cast, and directed by people who have never even been to the South except for helicoptering in to a few set locations that were first scoured of actual local inhabitants). The premise was super-interesting and well executed until the final sequence of events. And, finally, the lead boy reminded me so much of my husband at that age based on pictures and the stories I’ve heard that he was almost painfully sentimental to watch. (The boy’s look and attitude reminded him of himself, too, so this was not just me.)

Imagine him all grown up, college-educated and come back to his blue-collar-family roots. <3

The Disappointing: The climax seemed…out of step with the rest of the film. ***Spoilers through the rest of this column. Read on at your own risk***

A Strategic Victory I Almost Overlooked

I had occasion today to read back through a correspondence I had with another writer a few months ago. The context was why I started with Regency romance (as opposed to a time period I am less familiar with or a fantasy setting I would have to make up), and my comment was that I wanted to focus on something I knew “until I could set a pattern of finishing things.”

It occurred to me as I read those words that…I feel like I have hit the point where finishing is no longer a question. It might have taken me close to two years to get to this point, but I have written two novels (that still feels great to say!) and feel much more confident in my ability to keep a project under control and pointed at that end zone.

Finishing is no longer a state of being I look upon with despair for never knowing it. For that, I am proud of myself. I have accomplished at least my first goal as a novelist.

Finishing DFL is always better than being the DNF.

Now I just have to make a habit of not being dead fucking last….

Psyche Dumpster Dive: Seeking 17-Year-Old Me

There was a time.

It’s 6:45.

No. I didn’t ask for the time, I said: There was a time. Take Lily LeFevre over there. Pretty fucking with it, right?

Um….

Not now. But there was a time.

Believe it or not, there was a time I had my time under control. In high school I was overinvolved – athlete, full honors schedule (some years as many as 7 of my 8 classes), various academic clubs. I ran 20 miles a week in the off-season, cooked dinner for my family 5+ nights a week, and graduated with a GPA of 106. I had friends that I actually did hang out with outside of school. I was skinny and watched what I ate with the fanatical obsession that only a teenage girl can generate–if I had an eating disorder it was only what health nuts in general have. I handled all this by a strictly regimented life. Up at 6:05. Driving to school by 7:05. As soon as I got home, homework until 6, then a 2-4 mile run, then cooking dinner, then finishing my homework, then bed by 9:30 sharp. Repeat. The only variance during soccer season was practice after school, come home and cook, and cram all my homework in the hours between dinner and bed, putting off till the weekend anything that could be put off. I did not watch TV. I hardly ever read for pleasure (when I did it was on the weekends and summer vacations), didn’t write much besides filthy poems and emails to the pen pal I was in love with at the time, didn’t cosplay, didn’t have hobbies. Achieving and regimenting my life were my hobbies.

College was a lesser version the same – full academic course load every semester, various extra-curricular involvements, much more active social life, worked part-time, graduated cum laude from my university with special honors from my liberal arts honors program. Still no TV, but once I met my husband (sophomore year) I started seeing a lot of movies and, in the falls, football games, and lots of live music. Again, I rarely wrote except during the summers. My hobbies were my friends, drinking, and achieving as high as I could with as little effort as possible.

And then The Great Decade of Failing began.

Oh, I suppose, my life is not a failure, exactly: I’m happily married, living in a house we own, maintaining a full-time job I don’t hate in a city I love. But I am not doing what I want to be doing with my life, other than in an existential sense. I don’t love my job enough to give up writing. I don’t love my job enough to keep it if I could make the same money from writing (or less, so long as it was a livable wage, if by the time I get there with writing I am making a lot more at my current job). I am also failing my potential in an academic sense (but no one cares about that except my family who didn’t have anything to brag on me for until they figured out how to spin my job), and when I look at the amount of time I waste just…existing, I get a little bit wound up or despairing.

I don’t know how I used to do what I did back then in the sense of making myself do it. I think I had an end goal in mind (getting out of my country town with a scholarship to university) that was more important than the inherently lazy, self-indulgent, drifter that I was as a child and that I let myself return to after college. I remember the military precision of my schedule. I remember that not doing the things I had set for myself was simply not an option. Now when I feel that, it’s generally because I have procrastinated something I want to have or said I would do, that does have a deadline, and then I have to spend every second on it and be frantic the whole time and make compromises.

I need to find the old NCO who used to run such a tight ship in my brain and bring her out of retirement. I need to set goals that need to be met and make myself believe that not meeting them is not an option.

I need 17-year-old psycho Lily to re-po my mind and body for about a year. Maybe two. If I could kick this day job I’d have all the time I need for both achievement AND indulgence. I wrote my first novel during the summer when I had nothing to do except indulge my passions – reading, writing, watermelon. I wrote my first novella that I might let someone else read over spring break – same song, different season. I can be fantastically, unswaveringly devoted to achieving my goals when I have the time to do it “naturally” – but until I get there, what I need instead is the fraulein who ran her life like an 18th-century automaton. I need Robot Lily.

Progress Report: Writing in Snatches, Three Days In

So far, so good with the attempting to write in the pockets and cracks of my life thing. I have written about 3700 words this weekend, which is not amazing for it being a weekend but still quite acceptable, considering I also cleaned the house, went to brunch and a movie with hubs this morning, read a book, read part of another book, and lost three or more hours of my afternoon to a research question that the internet, it turns out, does not have an answer for.

I am definitely still in the honeymoon phase with this book–the opening third, which is always, always, always the easiest for me to write. I am still about 10K away from hitting the mushy middle, assuming I have properly projected this story to about 75K. I have shockingly few scenes pre-written, given how long this story has been in my mind, and I am shockingly okay with that. I have a rough outline. I know what every single major event in the story is–all the things that happen, plotwise, to bring it home. I was emailing a friend about outlining and explained that, with this one, it feels like I have directions based on road numbers and directionals (take I-20 east, exit at US-184 south, etc.) but am driving the route without really looking at the map to see how far it will take to get to the next turn or how the road curves to get there. Driving blind but not directionless, if that is not too tortured a metaphor.

All that said, this coming week will be the real test of this method of writing. Can I find a way to focus by Wednesday night, when my back is aching and my brain is tired and my introverted batteries have been drained by a taxing work environment? THAT remains still to be seen. This could just be weekend magic, after all….

Searches and Spam

“The film’s scandal centred mostly on an anal sex scene featuring the use of butter as a lubricant.”

I wish I knew what film the spam-bot was referring to – it sounds arthouse rather than pornographic. I, however, know better than to run a search on “anal sex with butter” even WITH a boolean “not pornography” addendum.

File these following searches under Came To The Right Place:

• human squid porn
• i hate this means war/hated the ending of this means war movie
• primogeniture in history and story
• intj romance
• intj female characters
• intj female existence
• intj women one in a billion
• where are all the intj women

File these search terms under Come Back Later, I Guarantee I Will Address This Eventually

• bad faith sex scenes
• romance novel with masturbation heroine
• red riding hood romance novel

 And file these under Not Sure How You Ended up Here at All, But Thanks for the Laugh

• scapegoating and negative energy dumping
• why romance is pointless
• hotasex
• naughty girls with knickers taken down