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Someone
Right line: actually listening, not just hearing.
Tyop line: actually listening, not just herring.
As if I would ever speak dismissively of herring, even in a fictional character's voice!
I skipped the part of the mid-book where I don't know what to do next and it's all kind of messy and it drags on forever and won't this book ever go somewhere? This is a very good thing to skip, if you can manage it. I hope to skip it next book, too, actually.
What my brain has decided to give me instead is the idea-storm that comes before the last burst of brain-eating. Any minute now the last third of this novel is going to hunker down and make breakfast out of most of my grey matter. And before that happens, the brain is throwing out ideas like crazy -- maybe attempted defense from the brain-eating process, maybe inspiration from the burst of work to come. Hard to say.
But the neat part is that many of these ideas are things I've wanted to do for awhile now, and they've fallen together, and I think they'll stay fallen together until after the book draft is done some weeks from now. This is good. They are disproportionately SF short stories, and I could use a few more of those.
The thing is, there are things you want to do, and then there are things you want to have done, and then there are things you want someone to have done. I've been wanting someone to do some of a particular type of SF short story. But it's very hard to motivate oneself to things someone ought to do, even with one's childhood pastor's voice in one's head empowering one just when one didn't really want to be empowered. ("Someone ought to do it? Square your shoulders, lift your chin, and say, 'Hey! I'm someone!'") This is the source of a lot of house chores not getting done in a lot of houses: "Oh, someone ought to do the dishes. Hmm, someone ought to vacuum the stairs." And when something someone ought to do competes with something I ought to do and something I want to do -- well, "someone" loses, more often than not. But now! Now there are SF stories I want to write, in modes in which I want someone to have written! Fortuitous coincidence! Happy day!
I know there are people who have careers as writers but never actually want to write. They want to have written. I have a great deal of respect for these people's self-discipline. Sometimes I want to have written, but mostly I want to write. This is very useful. Writing can be hard, but having written has all the hard of writing built into it plus some extra hard all its own.
So having scribbled notes for one entirely new YA novel and two short stories, onwards, onwards, back to the book. Well, to Byerly's. But then back to the book. Go book.
Tyop line: actually listening, not just herring.
As if I would ever speak dismissively of herring, even in a fictional character's voice!
I skipped the part of the mid-book where I don't know what to do next and it's all kind of messy and it drags on forever and won't this book ever go somewhere? This is a very good thing to skip, if you can manage it. I hope to skip it next book, too, actually.
What my brain has decided to give me instead is the idea-storm that comes before the last burst of brain-eating. Any minute now the last third of this novel is going to hunker down and make breakfast out of most of my grey matter. And before that happens, the brain is throwing out ideas like crazy -- maybe attempted defense from the brain-eating process, maybe inspiration from the burst of work to come. Hard to say.
But the neat part is that many of these ideas are things I've wanted to do for awhile now, and they've fallen together, and I think they'll stay fallen together until after the book draft is done some weeks from now. This is good. They are disproportionately SF short stories, and I could use a few more of those.
The thing is, there are things you want to do, and then there are things you want to have done, and then there are things you want someone to have done. I've been wanting someone to do some of a particular type of SF short story. But it's very hard to motivate oneself to things someone ought to do, even with one's childhood pastor's voice in one's head empowering one just when one didn't really want to be empowered. ("Someone ought to do it? Square your shoulders, lift your chin, and say, 'Hey! I'm someone!'") This is the source of a lot of house chores not getting done in a lot of houses: "Oh, someone ought to do the dishes. Hmm, someone ought to vacuum the stairs." And when something someone ought to do competes with something I ought to do and something I want to do -- well, "someone" loses, more often than not. But now! Now there are SF stories I want to write, in modes in which I want someone to have written! Fortuitous coincidence! Happy day!
I know there are people who have careers as writers but never actually want to write. They want to have written. I have a great deal of respect for these people's self-discipline. Sometimes I want to have written, but mostly I want to write. This is very useful. Writing can be hard, but having written has all the hard of writing built into it plus some extra hard all its own.
So having scribbled notes for one entirely new YA novel and two short stories, onwards, onwards, back to the book. Well, to Byerly's. But then back to the book. Go book.
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You know, that perfectly encapsulates the current state of my life.
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It doesn't lessen my brain-eaten state at all to feel I have company, but somehow it's still reassuring.
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Um. It occurs to me that if you don't know that joke, that line is going to make no sense.
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And a kitten!
*waits*
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Is there a way you can 'fade out' to the next part of the story that engages your interest, doing away with the boggy parts altogether?
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In the writing of some books, I have come upon a spot in the middle of the book where the weight of all the worldbuilding/character/etc. decisions I've already made is coming down on me, but the book has not picked up quite enough gravitation to fall together under its own mass and start making helium. Because I write out of sequence, this spot is not "Chapter 16" or "that one scene with the dirigible" or whatever, because I can simply do something else if one scene is being a pill. It's a certain point of book in my head. It's like some books are shaped like this:
/\
( )
\/
and the bulgy parentheses bit in the middle is the hard bit. (Again, in length, not in book position. Other people writing sequentially makes it hard for me to express that that's not my default, sometimes.) But this one seems to have done this:
/\
\/
with no bulge in the middle! That once I was done with the exciting, "Hey, I could throw this in here; there's room yet before I get to the kitchen sink!" part of the beginning, I had already achieved the, "Hey, all of this makes it fall together!" stage of the end.
Not only is this not about specific scenes, but it doesn't appear to be about total book length: while this will turn out much shorter than Thermionic Night plus Copper Mountain in story arc, it's much longer than my YAs, many of which did have that bulgy middle bit, albeit only for a few thousand words.
The other thing going on is that there is a mode of short stories in which I wanted someone to write, in their entirety. I was not, as a whole, interested in writing them myself. The whole story. So I skipped the boggy parts, that is to say, I didn't write those stories at all. But now they're looking interesting, also in their entireties. So yay.
I don't think that the bits that are boring for a particular writer to write, or that are difficult, or that provoke difficulty in completion, are necessarily bad for the reader to read. I have run into plenty of things where the writer was clearly thrilled to death with what they were writing, and the reader -- that is to say, yours truly -- was not. It'd be great if writing got to be a purely fun, creative job by way of being good writing, but I think even fun, creative jobs end up with boring sloggy bits sometimes.