Changing the World.

Sadly, this is not a post about how writing can change the world.  I mean, we all know it can do that, but it's not something I've personally experienced.  My stuff would have to be read by more people than I can count on two hands for it to even start changing anything.

Yes, I'm opening with self-deprecation.  It's what I do.  :P

One of my current plots-in-progress has always felt like it was missing something.  As per usual, I was having trouble with the antagonists, and last week, I finally figured out what might work to solve the problem.  Making this replacement led to me getting a new perspective on what the world's magic should be, and that led to some significant rearrangement of both the plot and the cast.

I'm still working on a lot of this, but it's going fairly well so far; I've mostly been figuring out how the difference in the world is going to affect everyone's backgrounds, particularly when it comes to manifestation of personal magic, which is kind of a taboo thing.  Delving into the changes to the world that the new magic system makes necessary will be an entirely different thing, and it leads me to a troubling thought:

I'm not sure if this new world is the right one for this story.

Part of why I've been having so much trouble with this plot is that it's largely based around a single image that inspired both the main character and the third act.  Most of my work on it has been about building toward that moment.  And the changes in the world have me wondering if that moment would actually happen.

This is the part where I'm glad no one has ever asked me "Aren't you the writer?  Can't you just make the story do whatever you want?", because I don't need that kind of frustration.  >_<

I understand that the only way to figure this out is to keep working on the plot.  I have a rough outline of the actual story, and I've made room for all kinds of trouble for the cast, which is something I still struggle with.  But the problem is that I won't know if these changes work until I've put everything down.  And the doubt that's already riding my back on this makes it very hard to sit down and get to work.

As I've talked about over and over this year, I've had so many things not work out.  It is very, very hard not to think about that.  I'm trying not to let that keep me from trying something new.  But every time something falls apart, it gets harder to try to put anything together again.

I will keep trying, of course; I keep telling myself that this is what I do even when I have trouble believing myself.  And maybe this one will finally work out.  We shall see.

One thing I have been thinking about is taking the time to just create a world, and worry about the stories that happen there later.  Maybe I wouldn't have so much trouble with things if I knew more about where they take place.  And blogging about that process would be more interesting than another entry about my troubles.

Quotable, Part 3.

To make a long story short, last week was full of stress and overtime, and the only reason last week's blog entry happened was because I typed it up on Sunday.  I'm still trying to relax and recover, and I have barely been able to work on anything writing-wise for a week, because there's just been too much going on and this week is full of even more overtime.

So.  For the third time (Part 1, Part 2), you get quotes:

"A world in which there are monsters, and ghosts, and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels, and dreams, and a world in which there is hope."  --Neil Gaiman

"Write to write.  Write because you need to write.  Write to settle the rage within you.  Write about something or someone that means so much to you, that you don't care what others think."  --Nick Miller

"If you don't feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then what you're doing probably isn't very vital.  If you don't feel that you are writing somewhat over your head, why do it?  If you don't have some doubt of your authority to tell this story, then you're not trying to tell enough."  --John Irving

"We need to make books cool again.  If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck them."  --John Waters

"You own everything that happened to you.  Tell your stories.  If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better."  --Anne Lamott

"Don't be afraid to write crap, because crap makes great fertilizer."  --Jessica Brody

"It is only a novel... [or in short] only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language."  --Jane Austen

"Writing is the only thing, that, when I do it, I don't feel I should be doing something else."  --Gloria Steinem

"Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion.  Rather, follow your own most intense obsessions mercilessly."  --Franz Kafka

"Everything you've ever wanted is on the other side of fear."  --George Addair

And the last one I'm throwing in here for myself:

"A writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, or because everything she does is golden.  A writer is a writer because, even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway."  --Junot Diaz

On Losing Interest.

I've been thinking about writing this entry for a while, as it's something that's been bothering me for quite some time.

If you're a regular reader here, you've most likely heard me talk about having ideas that don't work out.  Either I can't figure out how the story goes, or I never figure out how to develop it beyond the original idea, or I hammer away at it for so long trying to make it work that there's nothing left but a metaphorical pile of dust.  But what's bothering me is when I simply lose interest in a story altogether.

Before I started writing STARWIND, I finished a rough plot draft on something new; I've talked about this one before.  I had six pages of plot, a good deal of world and character development, and a magic system that worked without people knowing they were using magic.  It seemed like I had something good, but when I went back to it many months later, I just plain didn't care about it, and couldn't bring myself to work on it.

As much as I'd like to think that no time spent working on writing stuff is wasted, that one definitely feels like a waste.  And I'm trying to figure out how to keep that from happening again.

I know that I can't force myself to work on something I'm not interested in; a lot of the problems I had over the past six months came from thinking I had to be working on something all the time.  But I don't know how I go from "I want to work on this every day until it's ready for me to write it" to "I don't care about this any more and it's going to languish on my hard drive forever."  I've never been one for apathy, so it feels very strange to think that way about my own work.

One cause, I suppose, could be that I just wanted to see where the story went - I had an idea, I pursued it, and once I reached the end, that's all I needed to do.  But that seems really weird to me.  What's the point of developing a story if I'm not going to eventually write the whole thing?  Pretty much everything I've ever written has ended up with anywhere from zero to four people who actually read it.  So writing something and stopping at the halfway-plotted stage because that's as far as it needs to go seems . . . ridiculous.  Especially after making a page or so worth of notes on the theoretical sequels.

To make everything worse (because I need to do that, really I do), I can think of easily half a dozen different plots-in-progress that I was having trouble with, then figured out something to make them work, and got all excited only to stop working on them again after a day or two.  Call me melodramatic, but this is the sort of thing that feels like the slow death of me as a writer, sitting here unable to dredge up enough interest in my own work to do anything.

This has gotten depressing, so I'm going to cut off my pondering here and ask if the rest of y'all have ever dealt with the same thing.  Whatever your process is, have you ever just plain lost interest in what you were working on?  Did you figure out what caused it, or did you move on to whatever came next?  And did you ever regain interest in that abandoned project?

IWSG: Slow Progress Still Counts.

I feel like I've lost half the year.

That's a bit of an exaggeration; I was doing okay until some time in mid-February, when things kind of came crashing down around me in my head.  I spent the next few months dragging myself down, around, through, and eventually out of that.  It's taken me that long to feel like I can make this writing thing work for myself again.

But it feels like a lot has changed.  Where I used to be able to sit down and hammer out two or three pages of plot and story work in a night, I now struggle to figure out a few paragraphs' worth.  It used to be easy to work on my current project every night, but now, I constantly have to remind myself that it's okay if I don't feel like working on anything on a given evening.  And with every project, I wonder when I'll lose interest in it, or if I'll feel like I can't figure out how to make it work, and set it aside to maybe pick up again someday (but probably not).

My feelings about this, as I'm sure you could imagine, are mixed.

There are, however, two positive things I can get out of this.  The first is the hope that I'm actually getting better at this writing thing, which is why it's getting more difficult.  I talked in my last entry about seeing things in published books that I've learned not to do, so maybe I'm having more trouble putting things together in my own plots because I've got a better idea of what does and doesn't make a story work.  I could go on about this for a while, but a lot of it is too nebulous and long-winded to fit into a single blog entry.  >_<

It strikes me as funny that I'm thinking of things this way, though, because I used to feel like writing was an easy thing.  I didn't entirely understand when people talked about how hard it was.  I do now.

The second positive thing is that I can consider any work I manage to get done as positive progress.  Getting a page done is better than just a few paragraphs.  One paragraph is better than just a sentence or two.  And a single sentence is better than nothing.  Plotting used to feel like drawing a map as I explored new territory; it now feels like chipping away at a stone with only the basic idea of what I'm trying to carve and knowing that it could all change as I go.

But slow progress is better than no progress at all.  Any day that I get something done, I count as good.  I have to, or else I'll only have bad days.

To put it simply, this year has already been a kind of personal writing hell, and it's only half over.  I'll take any positivity I can get.