Fever breaking

Over three thousand words today. Over 1800 of them were me just writing out character backstory, but in a way that I may or may not use as part of the body of the text at some point in the future, and over 1300 was new words for the actual body of the text which, I think in subtle ways, changes the tone of the story, but in a necessary way. It makes it less ambiguous, and removes any sense of purposely withheld drama (which I always find is more cliched and irritating than page-turning). Also requires future edits to the rest of the text to accommodate the earlier dispensation of certain pieces of information, as well as the change in tone. One of the things I realized, after reviewing the text, that the story isn't really about withholding everything from the reader, it is about relating the world that Ermys sees in front of him, but with a bare minimum of commentary coming from him, since he is not a very commentative guy. Thus, lots of details can be left out, because the aren't how Emrys would experience the world, and many can be left back in, because they are. I kind of want to go on, because I feel like the world is very present in my mind right now, but I eyes hurt from staring at the screen, and I am exhausted, so I am cashing in my creative chips for the night. I've been writing for something like three, maybe four hours now.

Earlier in the night, I had not really written anything all day, and I was feeling restless, and unhappy, and I knew what the next thing I had to write was. So I just thought, well, then write it. Stop making yourself feel bad. And I did. Now I feel pretty good. I got through a really bad spell, and am back in the game. a whole bunch of edits and ideas are piling themselves up in me right now, and I can't wait.

Realize you want to do something, then do it, and feel better. Huh. Funny how that works.

Why haven't I thought of that before?

The Urge

Did lots of cleaning today. Put away much of the stuff littering my "living room" floor, organized and re -shelved all the books on my bookcase, dusted a whole bunch of stuff, finally moved that old television sitting in the middle of the floor up onto my dresser (I got it back in June), though I haven't plugged it in yet. I still need to buy a longer tv cord to stretch across the room.

I have been thinking about this Yglesias post from earlier in the day. The part that really got me was this bit:

Before I owned an air card, half of my train or bus trips to and from New York would inevitably result in me starting a novel of some sort. Not because I want to write a novel, but just because it seemed inconceivable to sit for that long with a laptop in my bad [sic] without writing something. Before there were blogs, I was always writing in a journal and apparently my grandfather did the same thing for decades. Consequently, I find it to be a great privilege to have a job where I can just write all the time, about all kinds of stuff, more-or-less at random. For me writing-as-such has always been a necessary activity, and trying to find constructive venues in which to do it a bit problematic. The blog solves the problem.

One of the problems, I have realized, with writing, and this is partially linked to the to epiphany that I mentioned in the last post that I haven't gotten to writing yet, is that i don't really give a shit about writing. It's not something I like doing. What I like is coming up with stories. Making up characters and thinking of things to happen to them. If I could tell those stories in comics or movies to theatre, I would be just as happy to do that. But I can't draw that well, since I wasn't taught to hold a pencil correctly with the left hand which means everything smears. i don't a millions of dollars lying around to hire actors and cameramen and CGI artists. I don't have a theatre troupe lying around. Plus, I am antisocial and, due to reading polomic interviews from Dave Sim and Jeff Smith and Alan Moore and Frank Miller and all the guys from Image, I have a fierce desire to work with my own creations and own my own creations. Writing was just something I fell in with, the easiest means to an end. And of course, like any of those other forms, there is actually an element of craft to the medium that had to be mastered, and so I went about trying to master it, and failing at it, since I don't really care, in some way, about that. Somewhere along the way, probably when I decided to major in English, I forgot that, and consequently disappeared up my own ass. This made it hard to write things I liked, since it was hard to write stories I liked, since it is hard to do anything that makes any kind of sense when in a state of phyiscal impossibility.

I am not saying that I need to forsake good writing. Good writing in inseparable from good storytelling, so I do need to be a good writing in order to tell stories well, and to tell good stories. But not all aspects of good writing are , or things that can be considered good writing, are things that necesarily need to be in good storytelling, and I don't need to concern myself with doing such things. What I need to concentrate on, is making the stories good, knowing what makes them good, and putting that in there. If I can start doing that, maybe I can actually start enjoying this whole writing thing.

Update

Whew, long time no blog!

Today, I did quite a bit of housecleaning, though I am by no means all the way there. I have been spending the last couple of days agonizing over SK. A few weeks ago, I wrote a detailed outline of the last section I had been putting off grinding out, and then I just kind of let it sit there. I could sense I wasn't happy with the way the story was taking shape, or the way it sounded. I kept coming up with things I didn't like about it, and I felt that the endless edits were just killing it, bleeding it of any vibrancy. Then, after cleaning, I tried doing some writing, skipping over the part I was working on to work on the next section. This section pretty quickly got to a point where I had been meaning to drop in an old story I had written, oh, years ago. I cut and pasted it in, and started reading it, to edit for (hopefully mostly) continuity. And sweet Jesus, it was terrible. Just really really really poorly written. Made me really begin to doubt myself. Was the stuff I writing now any good?

So, more cleaning, then I watched an interview on youtube with Salman Rushdie*, where he talked about developing your voice in writing, and that's when I realized the problem I had been having with what I was writing was that it wasn't in the voice I wanted for it, and I knew this all along. Maybe spurts of it are but...I don't know. I jotted down a couple of notes in my scrap notebook about elements I wanted in the "voice" of SK. Then, a new way to telling the beginning the first chapter came to me. I grabbed a fresh notebook and started writing it. The events of the opening are now so fresh to me I can almost write its events from memory. I got a couple leafs in a felt much better.

So, I have committed myself to completely rewriting it, by hand, in a notebook. I am thinking the improvements in the new take are worth it, but one way or another I need to stop being so precious about it all and get used to rewrites.

I also reread the first two chapters of Wheelock's Latin today. I really want to regain that skill again, and I think a firm knowledge of Latin is essential to getting the eventual voice of SK right. So, here's me committing to making sure I stick to writing in the notebook and working my way through Wheelock.

...Oh, and here's the interview with Salman Rushdie:

Watch it! It's very good!

*At some point while letting the interview play, I also readjusted the distance of my double-bass drum beaters, making half the distance from the head. This has immediately increased my speed and accuracy. I can get reasonably close to thrash speed now, and with no noticeable change in sound or volume!

You sound like a twelve-year-old hearthrob physicist

I don't really know how I feel about Cory Doctorow, as a writer at least. I tried starting two of his books, but didn't really find interest. Both of them started with the trope where the narrator discusses that they is telling a story, a metafictional trope that I find seriously off-putting. It put me off Midnight's Children and The Left Hand of Darkness as well.

That said, Doctorow's stuff on copyright is really interesting, Boing Boing is a fun browse, and he seems to be quite the ideasmith, so this interview for the Onion A.V. Club, courtesy the badass Tasha Robinson, is quite good. And it's long too, longer than they usually go over there, and well worth the added length.