lose yourself
Mar. 12th, 2009 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7So I'm sort of writing, as I have been, but the problem is that I keep getting immersed, and I don't have time.
I've had a flurry of ideas. I pushed aside the one novel, the one i've been calling Barbarians_Novel, because I was spinning wheels and needed to go into something else for a bit.
A while back, I don't know how long, I reread some old fanfic I'd set aside, and had an idea from that. I wrote like a fiend for a little while, and decided that I liked the idea a whole lot, enough to split it out from the fanfic. I've never done this before, but I find-replaced the names and found immediately that it was a viable idea on its own. (Sort of worked better without the original names in it, to be fair. Still keep meaning to post it with the new names and see if anyone can figure out who was originally in it.)
So I kept writing more. It was pretty heavy erotica, fairly dark, but I liked it a lot. I mean, a lot. And, bonus, was kind of a prequel for the Barbarians_Novel I set aside. That can only help with world-building, which is an issue for me a little bit. So I worked on it a bit. I still like it.
But then, rereading one of the more explicit scenes, I was dissatisfied. My male characters are always super-nice guys. I mean, way too nice. Too wholesome and good. I thought of how the scene could have gone if he wasn't. Take this primary female character and put her in a much less gooshy sweet-sweet situation, and see how she fares.
I considered rewriting it just to see what would happen. Though keeping the same characters in it would destroy the whole thing I'd worked on so far. The dark part of the new novel wouldn't be writable at all if the main male character weren't fundamentally a good dude. Then it would just be gross porn, and far too icky for me to actually stomach.
So I opened up a new document, scribbled a few outline ideas, and went with it. Don't need to make the main male character a bad person, per se, I just have to make him less sappy-in-love, goody-goody Nice Guy than usual, to see what that does to Primary Female. (We'll call him MM for Main Male, and her PF for Primary Female. Why not?)
I started writing the new thing-- I had to write a lead-up to that scene, because I couldn't jump in the way it was-- anyway I'd already written that one and had to write something else. So I came up with a situation, and wrote a lead-in to the situation, that would make the characters be introduced. And I needed a secondary character. Hell, the scene was going to be a threesome now. Much more interesting. Don't know if I've written one of those. (I really don't remember. I may have.) So a really important secondary female character.
Sure. SFC.
So I had to write her.
Predictably (if you're a writer, anyway), SFC wound up being far more interesting than the main character I'd started off with, PF. More personable, funnier, more passionate, more active and less passive. Bollocks!
So the main male character, MM, fell completely in love with her. Which was fine, i'd intended him to, because that made it easier to get the dynamic I wanted with PFC-- remember her? But the problem, as anyone who's done this before can see, is that that first character, PF, isn't really a person at all. SHe's an idea. And ideas are... flat. Not people. Not human. Not at all good characters. I'm so not even interested in her.
Meanwhile i want to know more about SFC. Suddenly it comes out that she's the more powerful one. MM has no status without her. She's the big cheese. Which means she has a powerful father. And that means... I'd intended to just have him killed off as the opening of the novel but now I have to figure out how the hell the MM came to be in love with the daughter of such a powerful man, when he's so useless and low-status on his own. (And what's his deal, anyway?)
The only development I've managed to do on PFC-- remember her? she was the whole reason for this?-- was that MM's mother came from circumstances similar to hers. Which means Holy Fucking Backstory, Batman!! Now he's a five-year-old street rat struggling not to starve to death, becoming a cold emotionally-frozen bastard to survive, and the secondary female character is six and plucks him from the gutter to be her new friend and plaything, to amuse herself. So she's the only one who understands that he's not actually emotionless. SFC's the only one who understands MM and he loves her hopelessly for it.
And oh Lord, now he's got to prove himself worthy to her powerful father, as he comes to manhood.
And fuck. Motherfucking fucking fuck, the fucking book's about him now, isn't it??? Which is the last thing I intended. I did not mean to write another fucking book about another fucking dude Proving Himself To Himself. But that's what this fucking is.
It's interesting, and plenty of people write books about men proving themselves, and it wouldn't be a total betrayal of my feminist ideals if I did-- right?-- but... but... it's really not what I meant to write.
I always end up falling in love with my MMs and writing about them instead of the PFs who I meant to write about in the first place. Grmmble.
My problem with my creative process isn't so much that I don't know how to write, it's that I don't know what to write. I can't figure out which part of this story would be the most worth telling. It's pretty much all come together in my head, but I'm sort of wondering... well, where should I pick up the story?
Because my imagination never presents me with a story, it presents me with a whole reality, and what part of it to write down is never something I'm totally clear on.
This isn't something beta-readers do for you, is it? Help you figure out which parts are worth writing?
And how can I get someone to help me with this? Because I just don't know whose story to tell.
And is "tortuous" really a word? Google says yes. Hm, how long have I been writing it "torturous" and mis-using it?
Depressing.
I've had a flurry of ideas. I pushed aside the one novel, the one i've been calling Barbarians_Novel, because I was spinning wheels and needed to go into something else for a bit.
A while back, I don't know how long, I reread some old fanfic I'd set aside, and had an idea from that. I wrote like a fiend for a little while, and decided that I liked the idea a whole lot, enough to split it out from the fanfic. I've never done this before, but I find-replaced the names and found immediately that it was a viable idea on its own. (Sort of worked better without the original names in it, to be fair. Still keep meaning to post it with the new names and see if anyone can figure out who was originally in it.)
So I kept writing more. It was pretty heavy erotica, fairly dark, but I liked it a lot. I mean, a lot. And, bonus, was kind of a prequel for the Barbarians_Novel I set aside. That can only help with world-building, which is an issue for me a little bit. So I worked on it a bit. I still like it.
But then, rereading one of the more explicit scenes, I was dissatisfied. My male characters are always super-nice guys. I mean, way too nice. Too wholesome and good. I thought of how the scene could have gone if he wasn't. Take this primary female character and put her in a much less gooshy sweet-sweet situation, and see how she fares.
I considered rewriting it just to see what would happen. Though keeping the same characters in it would destroy the whole thing I'd worked on so far. The dark part of the new novel wouldn't be writable at all if the main male character weren't fundamentally a good dude. Then it would just be gross porn, and far too icky for me to actually stomach.
So I opened up a new document, scribbled a few outline ideas, and went with it. Don't need to make the main male character a bad person, per se, I just have to make him less sappy-in-love, goody-goody Nice Guy than usual, to see what that does to Primary Female. (We'll call him MM for Main Male, and her PF for Primary Female. Why not?)
I started writing the new thing-- I had to write a lead-up to that scene, because I couldn't jump in the way it was-- anyway I'd already written that one and had to write something else. So I came up with a situation, and wrote a lead-in to the situation, that would make the characters be introduced. And I needed a secondary character. Hell, the scene was going to be a threesome now. Much more interesting. Don't know if I've written one of those. (I really don't remember. I may have.) So a really important secondary female character.
Sure. SFC.
So I had to write her.
Predictably (if you're a writer, anyway), SFC wound up being far more interesting than the main character I'd started off with, PF. More personable, funnier, more passionate, more active and less passive. Bollocks!
So the main male character, MM, fell completely in love with her. Which was fine, i'd intended him to, because that made it easier to get the dynamic I wanted with PFC-- remember her? But the problem, as anyone who's done this before can see, is that that first character, PF, isn't really a person at all. SHe's an idea. And ideas are... flat. Not people. Not human. Not at all good characters. I'm so not even interested in her.
Meanwhile i want to know more about SFC. Suddenly it comes out that she's the more powerful one. MM has no status without her. She's the big cheese. Which means she has a powerful father. And that means... I'd intended to just have him killed off as the opening of the novel but now I have to figure out how the hell the MM came to be in love with the daughter of such a powerful man, when he's so useless and low-status on his own. (And what's his deal, anyway?)
The only development I've managed to do on PFC-- remember her? she was the whole reason for this?-- was that MM's mother came from circumstances similar to hers. Which means Holy Fucking Backstory, Batman!! Now he's a five-year-old street rat struggling not to starve to death, becoming a cold emotionally-frozen bastard to survive, and the secondary female character is six and plucks him from the gutter to be her new friend and plaything, to amuse herself. So she's the only one who understands that he's not actually emotionless. SFC's the only one who understands MM and he loves her hopelessly for it.
And oh Lord, now he's got to prove himself worthy to her powerful father, as he comes to manhood.
And fuck. Motherfucking fucking fuck, the fucking book's about him now, isn't it??? Which is the last thing I intended. I did not mean to write another fucking book about another fucking dude Proving Himself To Himself. But that's what this fucking is.
It's interesting, and plenty of people write books about men proving themselves, and it wouldn't be a total betrayal of my feminist ideals if I did-- right?-- but... but... it's really not what I meant to write.
I always end up falling in love with my MMs and writing about them instead of the PFs who I meant to write about in the first place. Grmmble.
My problem with my creative process isn't so much that I don't know how to write, it's that I don't know what to write. I can't figure out which part of this story would be the most worth telling. It's pretty much all come together in my head, but I'm sort of wondering... well, where should I pick up the story?
Because my imagination never presents me with a story, it presents me with a whole reality, and what part of it to write down is never something I'm totally clear on.
This isn't something beta-readers do for you, is it? Help you figure out which parts are worth writing?
And how can I get someone to help me with this? Because I just don't know whose story to tell.
And is "tortuous" really a word? Google says yes. Hm, how long have I been writing it "torturous" and mis-using it?
Depressing.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 10:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 01:03 pm (UTC)So I looked it up.
I don't know what "tortious" would mean, but I suppose it has something to do with the legal concept of tort, not that I know what that is.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 01:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-03-12 02:43 pm (UTC)Show the critical moment, the turning point, the time when the person is being faced with something that will lead to him/her changing so thoroughly that they won't recognize who they once were. (i.e. the decisions they once made, they would now no longer make in that way, or the people they once loved they now would not, or whatever.)
The key is to show the moment of change -- what causes it, what they try to do to avoid changing, how they discover the only way to deal with the problem (or whatever) is to change, how they change, and then how, in changing, they resolve the problem.
Does that help at all??
no subject
Date: 2009-03-13 05:33 am (UTC)