"There is no Dana. There is only Zool." More so.

[mrissa]

Dear book:

Okay, it was time for me to be in bed an hour ago, because why? Because I was tired. And then you got me out of bed to write another 1.5K, and that's lovely, very fine work, well done. Go book. But as I am now alternating one eye open and then the other because keeping both of them open at once is too much work, do you think you could LET ME SLEEP? Thanks so much.

Love and kisses,
mrissa

Comments

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

have i mentioned that i totally envy your output, lack of writers' block, inspiration? i mean, i try to write, and 90 percent of the time it's like pulling teeth. at some points i decide i'd rather do the dishes. i have the ideas and then i sit down and like, nothing happens. anyway. just had to mention, which turned into a whine. have some cheese. ;)

[brooksmoses]

Can I borrow your tooth-pulling pliers? It's not going so well for me tonight, and I've got a Big Scary Deadline, too....

I think the big-scariness of this thing is a lot of it, in my case.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have my tooth-pulling days, certainly. But also it took years and some stressful situations to train my brain this way.

Part of it for me -- and I have no idea if this is part of it for you -- is that I had to really buy into the idea that I was allowed to write total crap and fix it later. That if I sat down and didn't know how to say that someone left the room without it sounding like I was a 12-year-old writing about unicorns, I should write it like I was a 12-year-old writing about unicorns and fix it later, in the revisions.

Another part is, well, this is what I do. But when I was a physics student (undergrad and grad), physics could very easily have overwhelmed everything else. So I had to learn to write regularly in order to keep the leash on physics.

The down side is times like last night, when I was really, really too tired to be up working. It's good to be inventive, but right before I typed this post, I decided that I should write words like this: "inexperienced" would become "nxprncdieeiee." I mostly liked how the "ieeiee" looked, and it made me happy to think that all sorts of vowels would get to live together like that. And I was still awake enough to think, right then, do not do this to your book, go to bed. The prose is utterly coherent. It was my ideas about logic that had run aground and were trying to pull cargo out of the hold without any kind of dock equipment.

Or else -- there are times when I sit down with my paper journal to freewrite, and I can't just freewrite any more, because I have trained my brain to make stories, so if I sit down and think, okay, freewrite, nothing about the novel, just a freewrite, what comes out is a coherent short story outline, or an interesting detail on a different novel completely, or whatever. This is kind of cool, but not without its drawbacks.