It’s always odd to talk about the writing process without either giving concrete examples from the text or just devolving into page counts. (I wrote ten pages today! I’m so happy! or I rewrote the same paragraph twenty times! I’m going to go jump off a cliff now, goodbye cruel world.) Nevertheless, it’s an enormous part of my life and thoughts and part of what I want to do with this blog is record that process, writing a novel for the first time. So bear with me if it doesn’t always make sense. Or, well, call me on it. That’s what the comments are for. (Only be nice, okay? Okay.)
Here I am with it: I’m approximately halfway through my novel. 216 pages, to be exact. 43,502 words, to be more exact. Sometimes I’m convinced the whole thing is overly dramatic, has a hokey concept, and lacks all subtlety or human truth to it. Other times I reread a passage and think, “Hey, I wrote that. Cool.”
I took two months off, came back to it, read through from page 100 or so, made copious notes, rewrote (painfully slowly – I hate rewriting), and now I’m ready to begin moving forward again. And I’m scared. Why is that?
I think it’s simple. I don’t know what comes next. When I read the pages I’ve already written, I see what I’ve done wrong and some of what I’ve done right. I see the shape of it and it feels as if it was meant to be like that – or, if not, then a fairly close approximation thereof. It’s a tangible object, words on a page, shapes in your mind. But when I then go to write forward, well, that’s all make-believe, isn’t it? Chimerical, an optical illusion on the road, shimmering and disappearing in my mind. If I have a thought-picture of what comes next, that’s sometimes enough and I can write a sentence or two and then step back into the flow. But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes I wrote that bit and then stop dead, stuck.
I think it’s a kind of stage fright. You have to be both hyper-conscious and semi-unconscious to write well. Evaluating, shaping, imagining, but not thinking too hard about the process itself. Right now? I’m thinking too hard. I haven’t told new story since mid-summer. I’m afraid of new story. What if I get it wrong?
Someone give me a kick in the pants. For now, I’m going to go stare at the screen some more and hope my fingers decide to type something more than gibberish.
Posted by Tamar at October 10, 2003 03:45 PM