Writing a book sounds so lofty. When you tell friends and acquaintances about your project, they oooh and aahh. But they don't know about all the peaks and valleys that go along with serious writing. People really don't want to hear more than the basics of what the story's about, anyway -- maybe a sentence or two, at that. They don't want to hear about how you get up at four in the morning to write for an hour so that you can get to your real job at seven; how you are often at an impasse in your story, thinking, is anybody going to want to read this, or is this terribly boring? Or how you labor over choosing just the right word, consulting your laptop's thesaurus, and when that one seems inferior, you run to the bookshelf and thumb through the really thick thesaurus on the hunt for that elusive perfect word -- only to return to your original word. Or worse, an extremely common, one syllable word instead. Writing is constant analysis.
What your friends and acquaintances also don't understand is that when writing works, it's like fireworks on New Year's Eve. It's elation.
It's falling in love.
I just fell in love with a new character, when my story took on a mind of its own. I thought I had it down. I knew where the twists and turns were, and it was exciting, all right. But frankly, it bored me. Because those twists and turns had already been written by history. Subconsciously I felt I had to stay within the bounds of the story as it had been written in time, even though I knew my characters would put their own spin on it.
But when a baby is born to a minor character, and this minor character tells Angeline that she will have to take care of the baby if anything happens to her . . . suddenly the story takes a turn I didn't know about. This baby puts a wrinkle on things that sure wasn't there before! What is it they say -- a baby changes everything.
And suddenly I'm seeing fireworks.
Labels: characters, history, story line, thesaurus, writer's block, writer's life, writing
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
