hooky

[dragonlady7]

Called in because of this pulled muscle in my back. I'd left early yesterday-- well, I left at 3:30. And that was great, because I could go to the frozen custard place and buy ice cream sandwiches to have in the house, and then I could go to the butcher's shop and get stuffed pork chops so we could have them for dinner tonight, and then I still could get home before traffic was bad, and then I could get sat on by the cat.
The muscle in my back is fine, unless I sit in an office chair, basically. Or lift anything, or stand for too long. Actually, or lie in bed in any comfortable position; I woke up pretty miserable because I don't like to lie flat on my back but if I did anything else it hurt, so I'd go to sleep lying on my back and wake up folded like a pretzel, no matter what I did.
Anyhow.
I insisted on pizza and wings last night, because even though I'd bought stuffed pork chops I was not going to stand and cook them. Dude had a rough day yesterday too; someone somewhere in their network of companies they work with had gotten hacked, but they didn't know if it was them, it was all very secretive, so they spent the whole day painstakingly auditing all their security, and they still don't know who it was but they've established there's no way it was them, so at least they know that. It was exhausting and stressful, though.

Oh, it turns out, sitting on this couch hurts my back. I'd been in the Ikea Pöang chair and that was fine, and then the sun was in my face and I was enjoying it but decided I'd get more done if I moved, and now I'm discovering that no, I'm not just being a goldbricker, I have to go back and sit in the Pöang again. I guess that's good to know. :/

I've decided I'm going to spend today in a last-ditch effort to make the Mammoths novel work. The pacing is terrible but I"m going to ignore that. I'm just going to skip ahead to the next Action Section, and I'll have to go back and fix earlier parts but like. Whatever. Go on, write the action, then figure out if it's going to cohere into a real novel or not. I spent all of yesterday afternoon feeling terrible about it and thinking I'd have to throw the whole thing out, and like, whatever, maybe I do. At least I should write the climax of it.

I made myself feel better by reading the abandoned novel I wrote from about September thru November, set in the same world but featuring whole other characters, which is how I figured out my whole arc about citizenship rights and such. It's also badly paced but it could be something too, and it's only about 35,000 words so far, but I stopped because I had no idea where I was going with the plot.

Sigh. What I need is like. I don't know what you call it. It's not a beta-reader, I need someone who can help me figure out where to go with my plots. But I don't know how to ask the right questions to get the answers I need, and I don't know how to tell what answers I need anyway, and I just-- I dunno, I read the acknowledgements of other people's novels and think maybe if I had these people I could have a novel done by now but I don't know where to start. I've written whole novels, fanfic ones, I should have the hang of this by now, but I don't. I have no shortage of ideas, I have no problem coming up with them, the problem is I have too many, and it's really hard to tell which ideas are actually going to sustain the story through to an ending, and which ones I could spend six months writing long rambling descriptions of but never figure out how to wind it up, and I don't know if an idea I have is good on its own merits or I'm just somehow mentally horny for it and want to make it a thing that it's not. I don't know how to tell, I don't know how to decide. I have too many ideas, I have too many possibilities, I have too much vision and too little discernment.

It's tiring, and I don't have any answers, and I don't know how to proceed. So I guess I'm just going to try to push through anyway. "Keep going" is the best answer, but all it's meant so far is that I keep going farther and farther and still don't get anywhere.

Comments

[unicornduke]

It really sounds like you need a sounding board or like, someone to listen and ask vague questions while you talk through it. I find most people just need to say things out loud to another person to figure stuff out. And another person might say, well that sounds like too many plots at once. I was reading a review someone wrote on a book they read recently and I was like, why are there so many plots in the book, jeez.

[dragonlady7]

Sometimes a ton of plots works out great-- the one I most recently read had like-- so many plots and then it all tied together and I was like, this is amazing and I wish I could write like this. i'm resigned that I don't, but still, it would be cool.

I do need a sounding-board. I'd kind of hoped I could avoid needing that by just putting up the alpha draft and keeping myself accountable, but it turns out I'm just lost, now. Bah. Maybe I can get through it. Who knows.

[redstapler]

What you're describing is basically an editor, I think?

There's definitely folks you can hire for that. (Or barter, idk.)

[dragonlady7]

No, this is for something I haven't finished. You get an editor when you've finished a draft. I need like. Sounding board stuff. Somebody who can help me find the skeleton of this thing and point it in a direction.
You know, the kind of stuff people's patient husbands and moms do, except my patient not-husband doesn't like my writing and my mom and i aren't that type of close.

I have a desire-list of people I want to hire as editors but it just seems like a waste of time to hire someone when it's like "hi I have about 45,000 words that's maybe half a story, where do I go from here"-- like, I can pay someone a lot of money to have them be like "well you've got some themes I guess", but there's Too Much left to do before it's anything. I'm not ready for beta readers, even; it's half a story, and the important part's not there yet.

I don't know! I don't know what regular people do.

[potboy]

This is really where plotting the thing out beforehand comes into its own. If you plot the thing in paragraph-per-chapter chunks you can fiddle with the plot before you waste time writing stuff that won't end up in the novel at all. It does mean you have to more or less stick to the outline after that, but imo it really helps.

[dragonlady7]

Ha ha ha ha ha oh dear. That has not worked for me one time.
I tried, and got like, twelve pages of "summary", for this one. I even did numbered bullet points. I don't know when chapter breaks should be, that varies widely in my works, so instead I tried to write scenes. And I got, like... seventy, before I was like wait, this is not a book, this is like, an encyclopedia, I have to stop here and try again...

In the past, I've tried outlining a bunch of different ways, and the problem I get is that if I do manage to do well enough that in effect I've written the whole book as a summary, then the part of my brain that's interested in it shuts off.

I've been writing since 1991 and I have never one time managed to make a plan and then write to it. Either the plan's shit, so I abandon it, or the plan's good, so I lose interest because the story's been told.

In this case, the plan was shit, so I abandoned it. I made myself take six months to plan it, and gave up, so.

I have no way out but through. So I'm going to try to get through. Sometimes it works, is all I can say.

[szzzt]

In the past, I've tried outlining a bunch of different ways, and the problem I get is that if I do manage to do well enough that in effect I've written the whole book as a summary, then the part of my brain that's interested in it shuts off.

THIS. SO THIS. You describe it perfectly. I have to be careful with any kind of outlining or even notes-to-self that I do (because sometimes I *have* to write an idea down, I know myself and it will be gone forever next time I'm looking at the file) because if it gets too detailed or specific I can't do anything with it. Has to stay super super vague. The vague ones are usable tho.

I have been thinking that plot and theme are two different ways of approaching a work, where plot is like "external events" and theme is like "characters' internal growth or change." Or the plot is the excitement and the theme is the feels, even if a story isn't long enough for a character to grow or change, it can have feels. (Tho if I looked hard, probably even in oneshots that are going for just one specific feel, that feel would be a character having a growth or change moment...) Whoops nearly analyzed it too hard I better stop.

The nice thing is that themes are all dirt-simple and they've been written and read a million times, AND YET. I mean, let's say "coming of age/finding a vocation story" or "tough character gets comforted and lets themself accept it," I will read those as many times as anyone writes them. They are the power behind a story and aiming for a specific feel is the reason why I write a thing. I often feel like, as long as I know what the theme is -- and they can be written vague or not written at all, they're short enough to just remember and they're more powerful that way in fact, stated without statement -- then the plot could be any semi-random sequence of happenings, I could throw darts at a dartboard and have a great plot.

[potboy]

Oh that's a shame! These days I'd be terrified to start a novel without knowing where it was supposed to go next, because it's quartered the amount of time I spend looking out of the window and waiting for inspiration. But I will admit that I got more interesting results by waiting to see what my subconscious came up with, and also I probably enjoyed myself more. Good luck with your process whatever it is :)

[dragonlady7]

I have to learn how to do outlines or summaries or whatever, but. I don't have time to spend staring out the window for inspiration anyway, but you're right, I do resent when i've spent a long time on what I thought was a story arc and it turns out to be a tangent. But I don't know how to avoid that.
I just don't have a lot of time to write, period. I dunno what to do about that, but trying to write to an outline doesn't seem to be working. *shrug*