Lesson #5. Learned for the 347th time.

[mrissa]

Sometimes I have to give up what I thought a story was about in order to have a story at all.

Sometimes once I give up on that, the story comes quite cheerfully along.

I don't only mean theme here. Plot, or central image, or a character element, or whatever: sometimes I fixate on the wrong thing early on. Hanging on too tight makes it slip through my fingers. Like a Rebel Alliance.

My fiction studio prof in college told us about this shrimp metaphor he'd kept wanting to work into a story, and his wife finally had to tell him enough with the damn shrimps already. For me tonight it wasn't shrimp, it was smallpox. So okay: no smallpox this time around. We can do without the smallpox. We can do without the city and the city elders. That is not where we're going from here.

Sometimes I really do have to get it wrong in order to get it right later.

I just wish I could get it wrong more quickly sometimes, so I could move on to getting it right, which is more fun.

Comments

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

This is a hard one for me. But maybe someday I'll get it. At least now I have a role model. :)

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

I frequently false-start my books, by which I mean, I write 20,000 words before realizing that I had set out in the wrong direction in the first place, and I have to jettison all those words and start over again.

I've almost gotten used to it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

For me it's a lot easier when it's 500 words of short story than when it's 20K words of novel.

[summers-place.livejournal.com]

I have a story that I suspect is trying to do this to me, too. I also suspect that I will let it, and that it will probably turn out to be a much better story as a result.

Two points and a bunny

[guppiecat]

1) My life generally also better sans-smallpox, so don't feel alone in this.

2) In programming, we used to say "build one to throw away", with the logic being that you learn so much making the first one that the second version is actually salable/usable. I never really thought about it applying to other endeavors, but perhaps it does.

3) Bunnies make everything better

/\_/\
(^.^)
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Re: Two points and a bunny

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Is very nice bunny. Thank you.

My life is better sans smallpox, too, but my goal as a writer is not to make my characters' lives better, but rather to make them more interesting as stories. So.

Apparently these particular people are more interesting when nobody around them has smallpox, though.