Flow, by God!
Feb. 10th, 2010 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pjthompsonI've been struggling with the writing for awhile. I went for weeks and weeks (and weeks and weeks) where I didn't write a word except on the blog. I got seriously twitchy and depressed. I just couldn't seem to get anything going and when I did try to force myself to sit down and work on the WIP, a feeling akin to marching up the scaffold to my own hanging gripped me. I came to believe that perhaps the Muse had changed his postal code with a request not to forward my mail and that perhaps my writing days were over.
What's life without the occasional crisis of faith, right? So enriching to the spirit.
So I started making deals with myself: finish this scene of the WIP and you can spend your next writing session working on something else. And what do you know? When I worked on the something else, things were pretty good. I no longer felt like Apocalypse Moi. I actually wrote. I actually enjoyed it again. The Muse was just being sulky. He hadn't completely deserted me.
This was encouraging, but the WIP still felt like a sluggishfest. Part of the problem was that there is so much going on in the last quarter of this manuscript, so many complex threads to weave together, that I was forced to do an outline. Writing from an outline is something of a story killer for me, but there wasn't any way around it. I told myself it was time to stop acting like a baby and just do it, fer cryin' out loud. So I kept at it, on those days when the thought of working on the WIP was less than throw-myself-off-the-castle-walls, chipping away at finishing chapter 22, beginning chapter 23...
And a strange thing happened. Although I was following the outline, little openings of story started to happen, little surprises from the psyche that I love so well when pantsing it all the way. In the last couple of days I've had actual, God-damned flow happening. You know, the kind where it's time to go back to work, but you don't wanna stop—just a few more minutes, just a paragraph or two more, please?
It's been so long since I've felt that for anything, most especially this WIP. I begin to hope again. I see signs of spring. The Snowpocalypse is melting. The waters, trapped so long in ice, are once more flowing to the sea.
Let's hope it lasts.
What's life without the occasional crisis of faith, right? So enriching to the spirit.
So I started making deals with myself: finish this scene of the WIP and you can spend your next writing session working on something else. And what do you know? When I worked on the something else, things were pretty good. I no longer felt like Apocalypse Moi. I actually wrote. I actually enjoyed it again. The Muse was just being sulky. He hadn't completely deserted me.
This was encouraging, but the WIP still felt like a sluggishfest. Part of the problem was that there is so much going on in the last quarter of this manuscript, so many complex threads to weave together, that I was forced to do an outline. Writing from an outline is something of a story killer for me, but there wasn't any way around it. I told myself it was time to stop acting like a baby and just do it, fer cryin' out loud. So I kept at it, on those days when the thought of working on the WIP was less than throw-myself-off-the-castle-walls, chipping away at finishing chapter 22, beginning chapter 23...
And a strange thing happened. Although I was following the outline, little openings of story started to happen, little surprises from the psyche that I love so well when pantsing it all the way. In the last couple of days I've had actual, God-damned flow happening. You know, the kind where it's time to go back to work, but you don't wanna stop—just a few more minutes, just a paragraph or two more, please?
It's been so long since I've felt that for anything, most especially this WIP. I begin to hope again. I see signs of spring. The Snowpocalypse is melting. The waters, trapped so long in ice, are once more flowing to the sea.
Let's hope it lasts.
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Date: 2010-02-11 05:57 pm (UTC)Secondly, yuck! Why do writers always have such loads of self-doubt! It's funny how you think certain things will be fun killers in writing, like the outline, yet then you find all these hidden surprises in them.
Good for you!
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Date: 2010-02-11 07:54 pm (UTC)And second, I've tried writing with outlines many times in the past and it usually does kill the story for me. I think why it's working this time is because most of the story was done and I only wrote the detailed outline late in the process in order to keep straight all the whirlpool of ideas in my mind. But I'd forgotten that even when you think you know everything that's going to happen, the psyche can still send you surprises.
I usually pause every now and then in a novel to do a loose outline of how I'm going to get from where I'm at to the end, but this is the first time in a long time I've tried working from a detailed outline. We'll see how it goes.
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