I admit I am stalling here. I am approaching the dreaded middle one hundred pages, and it scares me to death. I know what happens in that section but filling it out with hand gestures and the like is not always fun. How often can people say something without scratching their head or closing the cabinet door? You know what I mean. I see vast stretches of untethered dialogue in ohter books but when I do it, it feels wrong. Yet too much tethering will bring it down too.
Meanwhile I am reading Setterfield's The Thirteenth Tale and admiring the way she has written a nineteenth century novel and gotten high praise for doing it. You can luxuriate in her prose, roll around in it, because very little happens for long stretches. I can see why many like the book and there are some nice touches, some nice writing, but gee whiz, hasn't she watched The Wire.
I wish I could take more pleasure in it. I think I might have when I smoked twenty years ago.
How did I get to be in such a hurry? How did I get to be so ADD?
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8 comments:
Give yourself permission to write a really shitty middle 100 pages. Write inane dialogue, weird tags, and lush, purple prose if you need to.
All you're trying to do right now is get it out of you. Imagine yourself as a sculpter. You have to rough out the basic shape first before you can go back and start working on the details.
Good idea because right now I'm writing it like a short story, polishing yesterdays for 2/3rds of today.
I am here, primarily to procrastinate as I look forward to the vast middle 100 pages of my novel, too.
"It's like crossing the Sahara," he said, straightening his hat.
At least nobody is paying me for what i do today. The guilt adds another layer on it.
patti, i keep wondering that too. about my newly accquired ADD. i actually think blogging has made it much worse because blogging is all about hopping from one shiny object to another.
word verification: wudoo
Are we all lonely in our daily lives? Yearning for people who understand us? Have the same concerns? Do blogs allow us to be promiscuous? Do they permit us to be invited voyeurs? Someone needs to examine it.
I'm with Bryon. The same thing has hung me up. Then I decide it has to come out some way, and I can always fix the yucky parts later, when I have more distance between myself and the work.
I guess the problem originates with doing short stories for so long. It was easier to fix as I went along. Actually, I started with poems. There it made absolute sense to polish before proceeding.
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