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Another 5K bites the dust...
Nov. 15th, 2006 09:21 pmI’m on 30,000, and I think I’ve finally got my second wind.
A few thousand words ago (ie. yesterday) I was really hitting the wall here.
My characters suck, my plot sucks, my whole sense of subtlety/melodrama sucks, and I keep having to herd it back from the direction it wants to twist, because I had no idea that adding a single mild torture scene would immediately make my plot head for a direct echo of V for Vendetta with all the enthusiasm of a guided missile. I don’t want it to go there, because aside from the whole plagiarism thing, the scenes that attempt to support that kind of plot direction are some of the worst I’ve got. But since I still haven’t decided why the whole conclusion happens and I’m stifling the way it naturally wants to go, the whole thing is just... stalling.
I shouldn’t have taken a day off. I mean, I should have; I needed to. I really was about to break down if I hadn’t taken my mind completely away from it for a day or two. But I knew what would happen; I knew how ugly the horse would look when I tried to get back onto it. On Monday night and all through yesterday I felt pretty much like huddling up under the doona sobbing and never coming out, ever again.
( I had a good night writing last night, though, so today the benefits of having taken a break have really kicked in on my mental state. )
Aaaaah, precious new plot threads, which will challenge me to weave them in and make them important, hopefully giving rise to many more threads in their turn… And I got some lovely coloured index cards the other day, because all my white ones were starting to get mixed up and confused. I’ve been keeping reminder notes of all my underused spaghetti – continuity issues I need to reinforce in green, characters on pink, scene ideas in yellow – each with a tally of how many times I’ve already used them. So hopefully, in my moments of totally idealess despair brought on by actually finishing a scene and skimming through the whole document to find where to write next, I’ll be able to shuffle and deal until I get a connection and find something that I absolutely have to write, and right now.
Now all I really need is an actual antagonist, rather than a couple of people who are either annoying or only selfish and malicious on a very small scale, and one guy who I think is the antagonist, but currently won’t appear as more than a name and one short sentence which isn’t nearly evil enough to make up for his complete absense in the rest of the story. (And, of course, to stop rambling in my LJ and write the remaining 1400 words to hit my quota this evening.)
So as I said: my second wind, may it last long. I can’t believe how much better it feels to be 5K past half way than it did to be actually half way. To the next 20,000 – here I come!
A few thousand words ago (ie. yesterday) I was really hitting the wall here.
My characters suck, my plot sucks, my whole sense of subtlety/melodrama sucks, and I keep having to herd it back from the direction it wants to twist, because I had no idea that adding a single mild torture scene would immediately make my plot head for a direct echo of V for Vendetta with all the enthusiasm of a guided missile. I don’t want it to go there, because aside from the whole plagiarism thing, the scenes that attempt to support that kind of plot direction are some of the worst I’ve got. But since I still haven’t decided why the whole conclusion happens and I’m stifling the way it naturally wants to go, the whole thing is just... stalling.
I shouldn’t have taken a day off. I mean, I should have; I needed to. I really was about to break down if I hadn’t taken my mind completely away from it for a day or two. But I knew what would happen; I knew how ugly the horse would look when I tried to get back onto it. On Monday night and all through yesterday I felt pretty much like huddling up under the doona sobbing and never coming out, ever again.
( I had a good night writing last night, though, so today the benefits of having taken a break have really kicked in on my mental state. )
Aaaaah, precious new plot threads, which will challenge me to weave them in and make them important, hopefully giving rise to many more threads in their turn… And I got some lovely coloured index cards the other day, because all my white ones were starting to get mixed up and confused. I’ve been keeping reminder notes of all my underused spaghetti – continuity issues I need to reinforce in green, characters on pink, scene ideas in yellow – each with a tally of how many times I’ve already used them. So hopefully, in my moments of totally idealess despair brought on by actually finishing a scene and skimming through the whole document to find where to write next, I’ll be able to shuffle and deal until I get a connection and find something that I absolutely have to write, and right now.
Now all I really need is an actual antagonist, rather than a couple of people who are either annoying or only selfish and malicious on a very small scale, and one guy who I think is the antagonist, but currently won’t appear as more than a name and one short sentence which isn’t nearly evil enough to make up for his complete absense in the rest of the story. (And, of course, to stop rambling in my LJ and write the remaining 1400 words to hit my quota this evening.)
So as I said: my second wind, may it last long. I can’t believe how much better it feels to be 5K past half way than it did to be actually half way. To the next 20,000 – here I come!
