On Writing

Maybe it was the way I started the day, or maybe it was the fact that I hadn't had any caffeine, or maybe it was the fact that it was stupendously busy all last night, but I fell into a pretty big hole about my writing. That happens to everyone, I'm sure, so it's really nothing earth-shattering. I just thought I would get better about talking about it. Maybe this should even go up on writerrabbit, but I wanted to splice in general things for stuff as well.

I've signed up to submit a story for the next Writer's Group meeting. Beyond all of the macrophile ideas I have (which I don't think would be quite appropriate), I have one idea for a short story based on a universe I've been percolating for quite some time now. The world first popped into my head as an idea for a comic book, based on Beak, a character from Grant Morrisson's run on New X-Men. The idea of thousands of years of evolution betraying you in such a cruel (yet inherently amusing!) way was very appealing to me. Other people get beyond-cosmic, world-breaking powers, you get hollow bones and useless, vestigial feathers.

Anyway, to explore the world a little bit more, I thought it would be a good idea to tweak a short story idea that I had been thinking of with 'all human' characters and putting it in the setting. Of course, the story has changed many times since then, so the original 'boy-wants-girl' premise is buried under a lot of other...stuff. (I don't want to talk too much about it, since a lot of the writer's group reads this.) The changing isn't something I mind; I've already written a 'first draft' that's nowhere near what I want the story to be, so this is more of a 'draft 2.5.' What's getting me is how, the more I think about the setting, the more it seems to change; it's growing legs and running away from me faster than I can write.

If I had all day to just sit around and noodle with it for a while, it might be better. But I keep writing a page or two in the 30 minutes or so I have free, thinking about it, and seeing a million ways those pages can be better. I'm in this continual loop of self-editing, and because I don't have time to vomit words onto the page I just can't 'get something down' and go back over it in total later. It's really destroying my ability to follow through on this.

I'm not sure if it's the setting that's broken, or the story, or what. I actually feel like I can identify with everyone in the story except the two main characters, and there's the problem. I need to spend more time inside their heads...but the problem is I just don't have time to do that. Especially now there's a deadline to meet.

There's the thought of banging out a smaller, simpler story and submitting that, but no ideas come to mind. For some reason, I can never think of a nice, small, 15 page story; they're always five and six part epics or something lame like that. daroneasa and cloakedwanderer have seriously rubbed off on me. :P

Hopefully I can blast through the blocks this weekend, with vast amounts of down time. We'll keep our fingers crossed, anyway.

About the friend test: I think absolutely everyone (except for mut) got the siblings question wrong. A lot of other people got the 'first dream job' question and birth year thing wrong, too.

In the interest of fairness, here are some answers.

( Pepperidge Farm remembers... )

Now, off to work!