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landingtreeThe problem with my novel is that it's too many things.
I once decided to write a book whose first half would be the mirror-image of its second. Everything the protagonist was told in the first half would be false, everything he was told in the second half would be true, and all the locations of the scenes would repeat in mirrored order. I think this structure would be cool, and I began failing to write it almost at once, theoretical scaffold turned practical cage. This taught me that I am better at describing things than doing them, and that, having set six months aside to work on a single book, I couldn't.
So this year is, "What if I did that again, only now with institutional support in a class of ten?" It is going somewhat better. But I'm learning that what I write with is enthusiastic vision. I sit down and go "Ooh! I just realised what could happen next! Neat! I'll write the next bit!" This is why I always used to wheel from project to project, repeatedly re-acquiring my own surprise. Whether this lead to anything being finished depended on ambient enthusiasm levels, and in any event, it lead to my finishing only about ten percent of the things I started.
This also explains why, when I focus on a single project, I find myself always elaborating, complexifying. I spend weeks and months having forgotten why I started the project, until I find an old note from myself which makes the spirit of it come alive in my mind again. I write gleefully odd worldbuilding sentences, because I like gleefully odd worldbuilding, but also because those are the sentences that re-excite me, rather than sentences which just, you know, advance established events. The course I'm doing is full of good writing-craft discussions and details, but if it teaches me only one thing so that it sticks, it may be, 'continue to write the thing you decided to write, even if you are not currently gleeful about it,' a piece of advice I've already met approximately everywhere, but which seems to need to be drummed into me practically.
In the meantime, I shall now explain why there were psychic pigs:
First, I read Homestuck. Then, I invented some aliens with unusual life cycles in which adults and children are never seen side-by-side, children are raised by dangerous symbiotic carnivores, and everyone is psychic. These two sentences have nothing to do with each other, and I am very original.
But, you see, the children are psychic because, as they age, their minds gradually take hold of the world around them, to the point where they shed their physical bodies and become the controlling sentiences of areas of land. So all adults are landscape regions, in which the children grow up. But there is another life cycle transition later: at first, adults are usually awake, but, as time goes on, they more and more often fall asleep, and when they are asleep quite different minds awaken in the land and come out in the form of dreams, which are warlike creatures, hard to communicate with. In the end, the adults sleep more or less forever, waking up only once or twice every century, an asymptotic approach to death. Children ready to become sessile settle in regions where the adults are very seldom awake, and in the end, take that land over, making the death final.
You may be asking what this has to do with pigs. The answer is that I had the realisation that the story I was writing about these people could also have elements of Odyssey-retelling in it, and that everyone in this society could, at some time in the distant past, have been transformed into pigs – and that for them, sleep is actually a throwing-off of the pig enchantment and a resumption of earlier forms. However, it has turned out to be logistically annoying to have them all be pigs. They need to be able to talk to human characters; my ideas about them don't have much to do with the pigs I am acquainted with; and also, I just imagine them as pretty much human-shaped. This has delayed me for unhelpfully long, before I was willing to admit that it would not be too hard to take all the chapters with pigs in and redo them as chapters without pigs. As discussed above, it's more true than I realised that I write in order to be able to say things like, “So, the psychic pigs, who turn into small walled gardens later in life...” which is very nice but not, I have found, fully sustainable.
And if you want to know how the rest of the novel is going, just assume that everything else is also like this, from the concern that I'm taking other books and ripping them off, to the logistical difficulties.
I once decided to write a book whose first half would be the mirror-image of its second. Everything the protagonist was told in the first half would be false, everything he was told in the second half would be true, and all the locations of the scenes would repeat in mirrored order. I think this structure would be cool, and I began failing to write it almost at once, theoretical scaffold turned practical cage. This taught me that I am better at describing things than doing them, and that, having set six months aside to work on a single book, I couldn't.
So this year is, "What if I did that again, only now with institutional support in a class of ten?" It is going somewhat better. But I'm learning that what I write with is enthusiastic vision. I sit down and go "Ooh! I just realised what could happen next! Neat! I'll write the next bit!" This is why I always used to wheel from project to project, repeatedly re-acquiring my own surprise. Whether this lead to anything being finished depended on ambient enthusiasm levels, and in any event, it lead to my finishing only about ten percent of the things I started.
This also explains why, when I focus on a single project, I find myself always elaborating, complexifying. I spend weeks and months having forgotten why I started the project, until I find an old note from myself which makes the spirit of it come alive in my mind again. I write gleefully odd worldbuilding sentences, because I like gleefully odd worldbuilding, but also because those are the sentences that re-excite me, rather than sentences which just, you know, advance established events. The course I'm doing is full of good writing-craft discussions and details, but if it teaches me only one thing so that it sticks, it may be, 'continue to write the thing you decided to write, even if you are not currently gleeful about it,' a piece of advice I've already met approximately everywhere, but which seems to need to be drummed into me practically.
In the meantime, I shall now explain why there were psychic pigs:
First, I read Homestuck. Then, I invented some aliens with unusual life cycles in which adults and children are never seen side-by-side, children are raised by dangerous symbiotic carnivores, and everyone is psychic. These two sentences have nothing to do with each other, and I am very original.
But, you see, the children are psychic because, as they age, their minds gradually take hold of the world around them, to the point where they shed their physical bodies and become the controlling sentiences of areas of land. So all adults are landscape regions, in which the children grow up. But there is another life cycle transition later: at first, adults are usually awake, but, as time goes on, they more and more often fall asleep, and when they are asleep quite different minds awaken in the land and come out in the form of dreams, which are warlike creatures, hard to communicate with. In the end, the adults sleep more or less forever, waking up only once or twice every century, an asymptotic approach to death. Children ready to become sessile settle in regions where the adults are very seldom awake, and in the end, take that land over, making the death final.
You may be asking what this has to do with pigs. The answer is that I had the realisation that the story I was writing about these people could also have elements of Odyssey-retelling in it, and that everyone in this society could, at some time in the distant past, have been transformed into pigs – and that for them, sleep is actually a throwing-off of the pig enchantment and a resumption of earlier forms. However, it has turned out to be logistically annoying to have them all be pigs. They need to be able to talk to human characters; my ideas about them don't have much to do with the pigs I am acquainted with; and also, I just imagine them as pretty much human-shaped. This has delayed me for unhelpfully long, before I was willing to admit that it would not be too hard to take all the chapters with pigs in and redo them as chapters without pigs. As discussed above, it's more true than I realised that I write in order to be able to say things like, “So, the psychic pigs, who turn into small walled gardens later in life...” which is very nice but not, I have found, fully sustainable.
And if you want to know how the rest of the novel is going, just assume that everything else is also like this, from the concern that I'm taking other books and ripping them off, to the logistical difficulties.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-27 09:59 am (UTC)I had to write to a deadline for the first time in ages on Tuesday and it was just awful. Spent the whole day hating my voice on the page and forcing sentences out only with enormous difficulty. Then on Wednesday I had 30 spare minutes and edited it into something I liked, and it was effortless. I'd forgotten how little my experience of writing a thing usually has to do with the usefulness of the result.
(I skipped the bit about the psychic pigs, because I have hopes of reading about them or whatever they turn into one day.)
no subject
Date: 2023-05-27 04:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-05-27 08:41 pm (UTC)