Transition Girl

Why transition girl?... Best answered by a quote from the Iliad....."The soul was not made to dwell in a thing; and when forced to it, there is no part of that soul but suffers violence."

Friday, June 24, 2016

Cutting Losses

Forgive me, it has been a while since my last confession. The first half of 2016 has been at best sporadic from a writing point of view. Hard to write about your writing experiences (yes, this is what this blog is about) when you are not writing.

Sure, there's been the odd moment of inspiration from an ideas point of view. Came up with a pearl of a short story idea (working title "Touch Therapy") though could not move beyond working out the names of the key characters in the story. Came up with some brilliant additional scenes to include during the redrafting process of my sixth book (working title "The Peithosian Gift") though have been struggling since January to actually draft or redraft anything.

I have, of course, been procrastinating. Big time. Road trips, baking, binge viewing of old tv shows, philosophising about the circular nature of time. (Aside: The last one I put the blame entirely on a brilliant science fiction show on Syfy called 12 Monkeys, which has been blowing my mind each week over the Autumn and Winter months, with ideas of an incredibly high calibre. Story telling just doesn't get any better than this show. Kudos to the show's writers.) Somewhere in between has been the odd sit down, writing at about a quarter of the pace I usually work. Through all of this and another extension of a deadline (for the next completed draft) there's been a niggling doubt in my mind that I am not taking the novel story in the direction I wanted to head when I originally started the drafting process.

At first I believed it was because I am content. I moved homes last December and the new surrounds have been so serene that I have relaxed to the point where people are asking if my personality has changed. The former steel wire ball is now soft loose string. I don't know whether to be complimented or offended by the suggestion. I figured out a long time ago that I write better from a darker space so the happier I am the less I write. (No prizes for guessing I did not write much during my university days or in the early years of my former marriage.)

After weeks of seriously intense dreams, I woke up this morning realising it was something else. My unanchored nightscape has a way of signposting (in neon lights) things I need to figure out even if most of the time it involves interpreting symbols only decipherable using a master code that's taken me years to break. The recurring theme in the dreams has been killing off strangers or destroying objects that are getting in the way of finishing a puzzle. Most people might think these death-filled dreams are disturbing yet I have not woken up feeling terrified or sad. The dreams are not about real death at all. As I said, metaphorical symbols of something else. Hence my interpretation that the dreams mean I need to change direction on a significant project in my life. And the project that matters to me is the work on the current novel.

Better late than never I suppose. It dawned on me that I have never been truly comfortable with my editor's suggestion to jettison one of the pivotal plot devices I used in the first draft of the current project. In the first draft , one of the main characters did not have a main POV (point of view). I did this deliberately because I wanted to tell the story from everyone else's perspective of this character to sell the idea that everyone had a view that was a long way from the actual truth (effectively the unreliable narrator concept taken to an extreme). My editor asked me to rethink it. I did. Reworked the plot to include this character's POV - it took me most of last summer to do this and on paper the new scene by scene summary sounded fine. But, in the time since then, I have redrafted less than one fifth of the reworked story. Just haven't been able to sit down and concentrate.

Today I will be going back to the drawing board. I will change direction. Cut my losses. I do not expect it will take me the rest of the winter to adjust the story summary. I expect that this decision will probably mean I will make my next deadline (early December) for a second completed draft. A step back will help me to move forward. Sometimes you need to run full circle and return to the start to figure out that's when you need to be.

I feel inspired to write this morning.