How are things going? Not so good. I got the Arcana in early but haven’t finished a thing since. I haven’t written anything longer than 15,000 words this year. The screenplay is still slow-going, particularly since I realized I was going about the framing device in an utterly wrong way and had to take out those scenes for redoing—which is also on hold while we try to find some more biographical information.

I have all my deadlines in a “days until” countdown widget in iGoogle, and while the number of days looks like a lot, when I think about everything I’m planning to do in those numbers of days I just deflate a bit. I need more time, I need more discipline, I need more words.

It’s almost September and I feel like I haven’t accomplished a thing this year, particularly compared to last year.

Current Mood:  gloomy

First, an FYI: I’m redoing the categories and tags for the site, trying to neaten them up. I apologize for any inconvenience.

Now, for the Deep Thoughts:

When I’m writing a first draft, I prefer to write it straight through rather than skip around in the timeline. I look on a first draft as a draft of discovery: this is where the characters tell you what’s going on with them, and I usually have good luck with this. I’ll discover things or think of things that I never would if I were following a strictly rigid outline. (All of my outlines, when I make them, always have a portion that says “some stuff happens here.” There’ll be plot before and plot after, but there’s always a nebulous space where I have to figure out how the characters get from Point A to Point C.)

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Angela Benedetti’s post on plot is prompting me to write a little bit about it myself. (Tremble with fear when I get on my soapbox. Though, disclaimer: I don’t know everything, and I know I don’t know everything.)

There are a lot of theories about how many different kinds of plots there are and how they break down (I have a book called Twenty Master Plots, for example, which I think is as much as you can refine them), but I think they’re all basically elaborations on these two plots: man vs. internal and man vs. external. And the best written stories combine the two, so there’s an A plot and a B plot.
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This entry at Smart Bitches about why happy endings are considered inferior has reminded me of the struggle I’m having with The Movie, and I thought I’d repost something I wrote in another blog here.

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How to Write a Book

My favorite is number 7: “Never have a mental breakdown before 11 p.m.”

Oh, I know that feeling.

My absolute favorite book about writing, by the way, is The Unstrung Harp by Edward Gorey. It’s not about how to write a novel. It’s about what it’s like to write one.

This is so frustrating.

I had ideas while I was at work, so I scribbled them down in my notebook for when I came home.

And now I’m home, and I’m tired and my eyes hurt (I have eyestrain far too often) and my brain feels like sludge. I need to retrain my brain to have these creative sparks after work, when I can write, rather than during, where I’m expected to do other things.

Also, it amuses me that with all the editing I’ve done this last week, the word count has basically been the same. Of course, I’m only 50 pages in so far . . .

I have two journals. (More, actually, but only two that count.) One is for writing, the other is for life. But when writing=life, which should I use?

Tis a puzzlement.

Anyway. Have done about 800 words of revising today, though it’s probably more in the area of 2000 if you count everything I typed and then deleted. (Who is it that said “I never write ten words but I erase eleven”? Something like that.) The first chapter finally resembles something like how I wanted it, though it feels a bit character-heavy and info-dumpy. But the first version also felt info-dumpy, and this at least also has the advantage of sketching out all the conflicts that will come into play in the course of the novel.

But I’ve got to stop messing with it and move on. Tinkering with a first chapter is just another method of procrastination.

There was also some errand-running and laundry, and some enjoyment of how winter has abruptly descended on us. There’s snow on Mt. Timpanogus that wasn’t there Friday.