Echoes in a Hollow Space

Random quote of the day:

“If you obey all the rules, you miss all the fun.”

—Katharine Hepburn, quoted in Katharine Hepburn Once Said by Susan Crimp

 

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Random quote of the day:

 

“For me it is torture when I finish a novel.  The good time is when I’m writing.  When I am finished it’s no more fun.”

—Umberto Eco, “Book Notes,” The New York Times, July 12, 1995

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

But if you keep marching, sometimes you get a break right there at the end and a momentum, almost a giddiness, takes over. At least for me. Though not for every one of my novels. Some remained death marches until I typed The End.

Happily, I think I've made it through the death march phase of this one and the juices are flowing again. I'm actually having fun. I sometimes think the amount of stuff I have to edit out is in direct proportion to how much fun I'm having, but I'm in that place of not caring much. I'm having fun, I'm getting the story down on paper, and I can smell the ending. It has the fragrance of green and verdant nature, beckoning.

And I shall go, tra la, tra la, traipsing through the long, green grass, unafraid of snakes and tigers! Tra la!

Venus in Transit:



(Actually, I'm sincerely hoping it won't go this long, but I've traipsed through this kind of greenery enough times to know that I usually wind up at about 120k and then have to edit down. *sigh*) (But that's infinitely better than being stuck in the quicksand.)

This subject is in the air today. It occurred to me in discussions with others (and in the shower) that the one time I had a really long pause in writing, about four or five years, it was because I'd put myself in an all-business footing. I was a Serious Writing Artiste and I needed to think Serious Writing Thoughts and do Serious Work and be Serious About the Business of Writing. I couldn't read a piece of fiction without over-analyzing it, and I stopped reading fiction. I concentrated so hard on my seriousness and what other people expected from me and my writing, that I choked my muse. It got so bad that for the first time in my life since I've had consciousness I stopped telling myself stories as I fell asleep at night.

I felt damned lost, I tell you.

I took up other art forms—sculpture, textile arts, jewelry making, drawing—and although I love all these things, that just didn't fill that cavern inside me. But they did teach me to have fun again. That cold motherf**ker, Seriousness, unwound inside me. I rediscovered my sense of play in the creative process. It took all those four or five years, but I started telling myself stories again as I fell asleep. Then I started reading fiction again. Then I started writing again. Fanfic at first, but very soon after that, I was telling my own stories again.

This should be fun, people. Yes, we need to take the business aspect seriously and be professional, but it needs to be fun, too. Or we really do run the risk of choking that lovely trickster, our muse. And maybe this time, the little s**t won't come back to play again. He's a darling little s**t, but he does run to Temperament.

This is what I keep telling myself, anyway.