You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2009.
I’m really struggling with the turning point scene. The opening is stronger, and I think the more I work on it, the stronger it will become. So that’s good.
What’s tough is the rising emotion in the middle. I think Enser and Ilsabet have to get more and more upset with one another, and then something has to shock them into silence, so the quiet at the end of the scene makes sense. That’s all well and good, except how to do it. I might have to cut everything I already wrote, since it might be confining me. Sometimes it’s best to just start over.
I have to do something.
I ended up flipping through the end of The Forbidden Garden to find out if some of my guesses about what happened were correct. It wasn’t curiosity that made me do it, or not entirely. Curiosity made me read the end. Otherwise, I would have just closed the book, half unread, and put it in the ‘back to the library’ bag.
Ultimately, none of the characters interested me enough to keep me reading. To me, they weren’t people so much as constructs going through the plot’s motions; no one felt distinct and individual, and I didn’t feel as if they were experiencing the story’s events. Not really; not under their skin.
Although I have a friend who’s talked about the difficulty of writing a depressed character — Cassandra was depressed; Nell had shut down; and Eliza lived in her imagination — I don’t think that was the barrier here. There were a couple of other POV characters who were less flattened, and they didn’t grab me, either. This is one of those books that for me was better in concept than execution.
I’m not sure what I’m going to read next; everything I picked up after setting aside The Forgotten Garden didn’t click. I feel as if I’m hungry for something in particular that I’m not finding. I know what when I find it, I’ll fall head over heels into it. Until then, I’m condemned to picking things up and putting them down again.
The beloved drove me to the day gig this morning, and because traffic was really light, I got in very early. Despite a horrid headache — not quite bad enought to keep me out of work, but bad enough to be uncomfortable — I was happy because it meant I had time to work on my story. I went into my purse to get out my flash drive…and didn’t find it.
I’d left it at home.
Sigh.
So I got nothing done on the story front today.
~*~*~*~*~*~
I’m on Twitter, if anyone’s interested. My user name is Katy_C — Katy Cooper was already taken. I’m thinking about yapping about books there, since I think it aligns with the way I’m working…
One of the things I love best about writing is when I reach a point with a troublesome scene that its potential, its true shape, begins to emerge, and it stops being something I’m struggling with and starts being something I’m excited about.
The turning point scene reached that point today. It still needs a lot of work — there’s a lot of unnecessary detail in the opening and the center doesn’t rise to a high enough peak — but now I know that. That means I know what to do.
I need to figure out what’s necessary in the opening — what do I want it to say? There’s a transition involved, but I always make too much of those, tying myself in knots when all I really need to say is, “Eleven days after their meeting…”
I also need to let my contained, careful characters flip out. They’re both faced with earth-shattering information; it’s weird that they’re not flipping out. Especially since they start to. I just need to let them keep going and stop containing them.
~*~*~*~*~
I haven’t talked about what I’m reading in ages. It’s not that I’m not reading — I’d stop writing first — it’s more that every time I think of trying to explain what the current book is about, I get overwhelmed. It’s surprisingly difficult to summarize books, especially when you’re trying not to do the book a disservice, while also attempting to make sense.
Right now, I’m about a quarter of the way through Kate Morton’s The Forgotten Garden. I’m enjoying it but not loving it, and not loving it simply because it’s not written to my particular tastes. Which is to say that not being lovable to me isn’t a flaw in the book but a matter of failed reader/writer chemistry. I don’t wish the book to be other than it is, just because it’s not unlocking my deepest responses. When that happens, it’s magic; you can’t blame a book when the magic doesn’t work, you just love the ones when it does.
The book is about Cassandra and her grandmother Nell. In 1913, when Nell was four years old, she was found, abandoned, on a dock in Australia. She was brought home by the dock master while they waited for someone to come in search of her; when no one did, the dockmaster and his wife adopted Nell. In 1930, when Nell is 21, her ‘father’ tells her the truth, shattering her world. Nell is never the same.
75 years later, Nell dies, leaving a cottage in Cornwall to Cassandra. Nell had never told Cassandra about the cottage, or the truth of her mysterious parentage. Cassandra journeys to England to see the cottage before deciding what to do with it, and to follow her grandmother’s footsteps in trying to unravel the mystery of mystery of Nell’s parentage.
That’s a very simplified synopsis; it doesn’t begin to touch on Nell’s relationship to Eliza Makepeace, a woman who wrote fairy tales in the early part of the 20th century. I know that I’m reading this for the mystery of who Nell is and why she was on the ship to Australia in the first place, and for what happened to Eliza, who apparently dropped off the face of the earth around the time Nell turned up in Australia. The book has made me curious, and curiosity is something I have no shortage of. I’m resisting the urge to flip to the end and find out what happened; I know if I do that, I won’t finish the book. It won’t be the end of the world if I don’t, but it feels like cheating, somehow.
You know how I said last night that I’d be writing short posts (and then wrote a lot)?
Well, tonight really is going to be short. I did some big ol’ revisions on the scene I’m working on, and I had laundry to do, so 9:15 found me before I knew it.
And it looks like I’m not going to the gym tomorrow morning either. If I’m still up at 9:15, I’m not going to be asleep by 9:30, which is what I need to do if I’m going to get up at 5:00 AM. I am not doing with less than 7-1/2 hours sleep, not for anything.
I’m likely to be writing shorter posts for the next week or so — I can feel that I’m heading into a stretch when I’m done, stick a fork in me, by 5:00 PM. My energy levels cycle over the course of a month or so, so this is just part of my normal pattern.
It’s a maddening pattern when I’m in the middle of a low-energy stretch. I hate being wiped out by the end of a normal workday, feeling as if I haven’t got two brain cells to rub together. Still, there’s nothing I can do to change it, so I might as well roll with it, letting myself turn an eggplant long before the sun goes down.
Still, I wonder if working out yesterday isn’t feeding this. The muscles of my back and waist are sore — the good, I-worked-out sore, not the bad, I-injured-myself sore — and the achy feeling is the same one I get when I’m wiped out. So the soreness could be triggering a memory of weariness. Impossible to know; everything’s too tangled up together.
~*~*~*~*~
After this one, my next weary patch is more than a little likely to hit when I’m at RWA National.
I can’t decide if that’s a good or a bad thing. On the surface of it, it’s a bad thing; National is always crazy and I wear myself to a nub. How much more worn am I going to be if I’m there when I’m already at low ebb? However, if I go with lower batteries, maybe, just maybe, I’ll be saner than usual and my weariness will force me to get enough rest. So, maybe a good thing. We’ll see.
~*~*~*~*~
On the writing front, the weary patch means husbanding my resources, and that means putting some things off for later. For example, when I looked over what I have for the scene in progress, I realized that the POV character doesn’t exactly sound like himself. I decided I can fix that later. Figuring out the nuances of the external events is demanding too much processing power; I have none to spare to rewrite things so they’re much more clearly from an individual perspective. If I can only do one thing, then it’s the outside stuff.
This is the kind of thing that makes me say revision is a writer’s best friend. I could never write a first draft of this scene if I thought I couldn’t go back and fix it later.
Writing the current scene is like creeping forward in a fog: I can’t go fast because I might run off a cliff. So I creep along, feeling my way, unable to see much past the end of my nose. Writing is going slooowwly. It’s kind of frustrating, because I want to write quickly — I love it when the words fly out of me. But I’d rather get it right, than get it fast, if those are my options.
I’m feeling ridiculously virtuous because I got up early (for a Saturday) and went to the mini-gym where I live, and rode the exercise bike for half an hour. It’s amazing how happy doing that small thing makes me. I really need to do that every day — the mini gym is a minute away from my house on foot, so how hard can it be?
Getting up, that’s the hard part.
The best part, for today anyway, is how gorgeous it is outside. It’s a perfect day, from my perspective. Low 70s, cloudless skies, cool breeze, not much humidity. It’s the kind of day you want to bite into, it’s so glorious. My happiness started as soon as I took my first breath of air, scented with grass and leaf and earth. I don’t care if it’s full of pollen that will my make sinuses feel like they’re full of concrete: it’s too wonderful not to breathe in as deeply as you can.
Today was a good writing day, even though I didn’t actually produce anything (yet, anyway). Mainly, I was able to see that a particular passage is just…useless. It kind of spins its wheels, not advancing the story in any meaningful way. So I cut it out.
Being able to recognize the emptiness of the passage is part of writing. Being willing to act on it, killing my darlings, is what makes today another good day.
The last 24 hours have been golden, story-wise. Last night, I figured out why Ilsabet keeps silence about some things she knows, and it’s a reason that makes perfect, lovely sense. So much sense that when I thought of it, it was a complete “of course” moment.
At the same time, I faced the fact that the events of the scene I’m working on make it a major turning point in the story, and I need to respect it as such. If it fell at the 15,000 word mark, I’m looking at a story that’s 60,000 words long, no ifs, ands or buts. It was too late to figure it out, so I had to wait until this morning to see where things stand.
Happily, the scene begins somewhere between 23,000 and 24,000 words into the story, which means that I’m looking at a book that’ll be around 100,000 words long, which is what I’d been thinking.
Finally, I decided to shift some of the things I’d been planning for later in the story to the section after this turning point. They work much better earlier, so much so that I’m excited to begin writing those scenes, instead of feeling a kind of “How’m I gonna figure this out?” dread. One event — something from my earliest conception of this story — may or not survive these changes, but if it does, it’ll make more sense and will be better motivated, and I’m feeling a lot more comfortable with it. The idea I have now makes sense to me, while the old idea no longer did. (It was one of those really cool ideas you get that just don’t hold up under closer examination.)
So I’ve had a really good writing day.
~*~*~*~*~
For my friends who read this on Facebook, I’m not able to get in, hence my silence…
