Even if I am going to be talking about beginnings and the best place to start them. And this is a bit long so scroll down to the underline if you can't be arsed to read the teal deer (though I think it's a pretty fine specimen of the animal).
Because that's where I am. Now that the glorious madness of NaNo is over, I'm back to working on my other novel, the one I actually need to - shock horror - think about. The one I love, which has characters I adore and a plot I'm marshalling into shape and lines that are perfect, but which is also driving me ever so slightly mental. I have to pay attention to what I write, rather than enjoying the freewheeling fun of writing without a plan or an outline or any real thought at all. Consequently, I'm finding getting started difficult.
To clarify: putting words on the screen isn't the hard part. That's easy enough. First day of NaNo this year (to brag completely) I did 5564 words. They're not particularly good words and there's a lot of placeholders where I didn't have a correct term for something so just typed MONSTER or similar, but they were fun words to write. The first four days I did over 16K, so being able to get words down isn't my problem - it's getting the right words down. (That and avoiding repetition, hello use of 'word' 6 times in that paragraph - but that's fixable at a later stage)
When you know that what you're writing has the potential to count for something, when you know it's what you want to send to agents, when you know it's what you'd love to see in a finished book in an actual bookshop...then the panic and confusion sets in. Suddenly what you're doing matters, really matters, and you have to make sure it's good. No matter how many times you tell yourself "oh, but this is fixable, you're not going to be submitting this because it is rough as and you need to edit the hell out of it" you still have the internal editor telling you that this time it has to be right, it has to be perfect. Which leads to no words at all being written, because you're agonising over every one.
It doesn't help to read articles about beginnings. I mean, obviously it does help because they're all full of excellent advice and thoughtful discussion, but they add to the panic and realisation that what you thought was amazing/clever/brilliant/perfect is actually far from it. Knowing exactly what a beginning has to do, what bases have to be covered and what you have to achieve is both useful and infuriating - as with much of writing. The actual craft of it is a pain in the arse (and yet I still love doing it, so clearly I'm either a masochist or a lunatic).
None of this is particularly helpful, except for giving me a chance to let loose herd of teal deer and splooge all over the interweb, but there is a purpose to it - I'm going to do some close reading/case studies of books and TV shows I love in an effort to figure out this beginnings malarkey. Not 'once and for all', as I nearly wrote, but to at least get myself into a better headspace. And if this looks like procrastination, it kind of is, but I'm justifying it with my powers of justification so there. I'm still fiddling with the plot of Novel, and need to work on the first act, but this is something to occupy me while I work on that. Also, TV.
The Plan
Choosing the things to watch/read
Books & TV from last 15 years - this is just going to be things I love/which are popular and these are not always the same
Books
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
The Hunger Games
Twilight
Stormbreaker
TV
Buffy
Doctor Who
Torchwood
Merlin
Not a complete list but where I am at the moment. I'll probably post the TV ones on livejournal, along with the books (which will also be here), but will link to everything.
And a quick link to my delicious list of articles on beginnings.
Now to get started...
No comments:
Post a Comment