When writing veers off
Progress has been very slow for my writing this past week and a half. I'm working on episode 5 of my serial project. It was one that I'd planned to offer a slightly lighter tone than the episodes around it...and I just wasn't feeling great about it. I had it all planned out though, and sometimes that's the main part--if I can just tell myself, "Suck it up--once it's written you'll see it's not as bad as you feared," then I can often get the draft finished and surprise myself. Not necessarily that it suddenly is brilliant, but that it works better than I thought and that what doesn't work so well now has a concrete solution rather than a nebulous doesn't-feel-right-ness to it.
So plugging along, in the second scene I threw something in that completely changed the dynamic, an interaction that was supposed to be antagonistic became neutral. That pretty seriously changes the entire arc of the episode...but I much prefer the surrounding events that make things neutral. And I could get rid of some bits that had seemed fluffy and superficial. Problem is that then I'm stuck, unsure how to move on through the remaining scenes. I don't think I've added more than a few paragraphs in the past week, and in the past couple of days I've done little more than rewrite the last sentence and delete it over and over.
I've just written a new sentence that will make it veer off even more...but I think it gives me an angle to continue. I hope.
(On the other hand, I have been getting a lot of stories out on submission over the past week, so I can chalk part of the lack of writing to getting all those polished and out there.)
Progress has been very slow for my writing this past week and a half. I'm working on episode 5 of my serial project. It was one that I'd planned to offer a slightly lighter tone than the episodes around it...and I just wasn't feeling great about it. I had it all planned out though, and sometimes that's the main part--if I can just tell myself, "Suck it up--once it's written you'll see it's not as bad as you feared," then I can often get the draft finished and surprise myself. Not necessarily that it suddenly is brilliant, but that it works better than I thought and that what doesn't work so well now has a concrete solution rather than a nebulous doesn't-feel-right-ness to it.
So plugging along, in the second scene I threw something in that completely changed the dynamic, an interaction that was supposed to be antagonistic became neutral. That pretty seriously changes the entire arc of the episode...but I much prefer the surrounding events that make things neutral. And I could get rid of some bits that had seemed fluffy and superficial. Problem is that then I'm stuck, unsure how to move on through the remaining scenes. I don't think I've added more than a few paragraphs in the past week, and in the past couple of days I've done little more than rewrite the last sentence and delete it over and over.
I've just written a new sentence that will make it veer off even more...but I think it gives me an angle to continue. I hope.
(On the other hand, I have been getting a lot of stories out on submission over the past week, so I can chalk part of the lack of writing to getting all those polished and out there.)
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