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Inspiration is bunk
Sometimes inspiration comes easily. A month or so ago, I was taking a nap after work because there was a steady rain outside, and rain always makes me feel sleepy. I half-woke up, was thinking about random things when this sentence popped into my head: “The monsoons made us think of home.” I wrote maybe two pages of a scene and had no idea where it was going, but the hard part was over: I had a beginning. I just had to work out what it meant.
Now that that one’s in the process of editing, I’ve been feeling antsy about writing again. So after sitting down and cataloguing a bunch of ideas, last night I made myself at least take a stab at something real, which makes the whole process that much trickier. You can’t really jump-start yourself into a kickass beginning — it just sort of comes to you. Hopefully, anyway. Sometimes I think all you really need to make a story is a good first sentence that you can hang everything else from, so there’s a strange pressure right off the bat.
Anyway, I gave up on this approach after a while because I had no kickass sentence. I had an okay one. So instead, I started writing little bits of side text, if you will, things the narrator would say about different characters in the story, like he was someone you had met in a bar and was explaining what his life was like to you. As elementary as this is, it somehow worked better, started getting me to write faster, skipping ends of paragraphs to launch into other topics. It was… a kind of nonlinear experience.
I think one of the big challenges for me lately has been to let go of narrative structure a little and take advantage of hypertext structures. I worry so much in general about readers getting lost that I think I hew pretty closely to a straight line — ahem, an axial text. So who knows? Maybe this one will be a little stranger than the last. One can only hope.
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I usually write sequentially, so that by the time I hit the middle I already have an idea of what the end will be. The corollary being if I keep thinking about this really great scene I want to get to, I’ll just skip to that… and it works out a lot of the time that the story ought to skip to that point, anyway.
Hey, I got here from Facebook (I assume you’d wonder.) I’ve found that when you get that one really good line, it can actually become a detriment to the organic writing process. Because you’ve branched from that line that you love and maybe by the time you’re “done” writing, that line doesn’t really fit as well as it should, but people have a really difficult time erasing it or changing it to make the whole better because they’re too in love with that one line. Oh, and I come from a poet’s perspective.. maybe it’s different for narrative.
That’s a good point. You can’t be too too in love with anything when you’re revising. I think in the past I would sometimes split things out into a different story — especially when you write start-to-finish, you’re sort of figuring out as you go.
Conversely, I remember sitting back after writing this long story and thinking, “well, I just burned through all the ideas I had floating around.”
I was really tempted to say that you feel more committed to a story because they take longer to write, but then I realized that I have no idea how long it takes to write a poem, even generally speaking. How long does it take you to reach a first draft you’re happy with? For a short story, it’s at least a couple weeks, maybe a month or two depending on how distracted I get.
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Interesting. Do you usually write from beginning to end? I find myself writing bits here and there, pivotal dialogue usually.