![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Dec. 8th, 2010 12:13 amWhen I hit the end of NaNoWriMo, my first draft of the Flesh-Eating Bacteria novel was just a smidgeon short of the end -- maybe a chapter, if that, left to go. Part of me feels lame for not having pushed through that last bit, despite the past week's extraordinary distractions, but tonight I was staring at it (I've opened the file and stared at it nearly daily since November) and realized it's not just a post-NaNo funk, I'm *stuck*. And I've been writing just long enough to have started to figure out that when I get stuck like this and can't move forward at all, it's because I broke something significant in the story.
You know in cartoons when a character is running by and someone reaches out and hooks a big rubber bungee thing onto the back of them without them knowing, and the farther they run the more the bungee stretches and slows them down, until they're pretty much running in place against the tension of the band? Eventually they get snapped backwards and slapstickilicious hilarity ensues. For me, this is what getting stuck feels *exactly* like. The farther I've gotten from the break point the bigger the snap-back, but it doesn't come until I realize I'm stuck and stop trying to run forward (which can sometimes take a really stupidly long time, because I'm kinda dim.)
There's a great thread on Making Light right now about how to get published, with a lot of really good basic advice, much of which matches sort of my own experience in what works for me, with occasional bits that really don't. Somewhere in the comments, Jim Macdonald describes how, when he realizes something is broken, he keeps writing forward from that point as if he'd already fixed what was broken, and then goes back and takes care of it on the next pass. Jim is also a very excellent chess player. Me, my brain doesn't work that way: I can't write the next part until I've fixed what proceeds it, at least in part because until I've fixed it I can't see *how* I'm going to fix it, much less what then actually will come next. This is probably also why I'm terrible at chess.
Odds are I'm going to let the FEBn rattle around in my brain again for the remainder of the work-week (too much on my plate at the day-job for anything more than casual tinkering during lunch, which I need more than for this) and this weekend take a stab at figuring out where I got snagged with the big rubber-band-of-story-doom. I don't think it's too far back, but I won't know until I actually land on my ass and manage to stand upright again, and then sometimes several additional steps backwards are necessary to get enough slack to unhook that hook. How all this plays out will also determine how/where/when I jump into the second draft.
So that's where I am.
I hope all your writing, and other projects and dreams, are moving forward for you (-:
You know in cartoons when a character is running by and someone reaches out and hooks a big rubber bungee thing onto the back of them without them knowing, and the farther they run the more the bungee stretches and slows them down, until they're pretty much running in place against the tension of the band? Eventually they get snapped backwards and slapstickilicious hilarity ensues. For me, this is what getting stuck feels *exactly* like. The farther I've gotten from the break point the bigger the snap-back, but it doesn't come until I realize I'm stuck and stop trying to run forward (which can sometimes take a really stupidly long time, because I'm kinda dim.)
There's a great thread on Making Light right now about how to get published, with a lot of really good basic advice, much of which matches sort of my own experience in what works for me, with occasional bits that really don't. Somewhere in the comments, Jim Macdonald describes how, when he realizes something is broken, he keeps writing forward from that point as if he'd already fixed what was broken, and then goes back and takes care of it on the next pass. Jim is also a very excellent chess player. Me, my brain doesn't work that way: I can't write the next part until I've fixed what proceeds it, at least in part because until I've fixed it I can't see *how* I'm going to fix it, much less what then actually will come next. This is probably also why I'm terrible at chess.
Odds are I'm going to let the FEBn rattle around in my brain again for the remainder of the work-week (too much on my plate at the day-job for anything more than casual tinkering during lunch, which I need more than for this) and this weekend take a stab at figuring out where I got snagged with the big rubber-band-of-story-doom. I don't think it's too far back, but I won't know until I actually land on my ass and manage to stand upright again, and then sometimes several additional steps backwards are necessary to get enough slack to unhook that hook. How all this plays out will also determine how/where/when I jump into the second draft.
So that's where I am.
I hope all your writing, and other projects and dreams, are moving forward for you (-:
