verbage: drowned city / whining: drowned city

[jazzfish]

From Wednesday:

Words: 1270
Total words: 6292
Neat things: Family. Also, the antagonist is a jerk. (Quelle surprise.)

Wording continues apace, in large part thanks to weekly writing sessions with Steph C. I have just about written up to the point where I know what happens, and I keep hoping a Brilliant Revelation will occur to me. Hasn't yet, but hey. I did find some family for my protagonist to bounce some characterisation off of so there's that.

---

Today was supposed to be writing, or at least plotting, in lieu of going out to Jericho Beach with folks. Instead there has been general poking at the internet, reading FILM CRITIC HULK's excellent article on Matthew Vaughn and Kingsman, playing backlogged Humble Bundle games, a little bit of plotting and worldbuilding and such, poking at BoardGameGeek, discovering a new game, going out and picking up said game at my Friendly Local Game Store, and a little bit of actual writing. Mostly in that order, although any of those that can be scattered throughout were.

I am not really 'stuck' so much as 'afraid of being stuck.' I am afraid of writing this scene because I don't know where it's going, which means I am going to turn my characters loose and let them yell at each other and see what they do. And I don't know them well enough to know at all what they're going to do, and I don't have enough scaffolding in place to know what (if anything) will happen plot-wise, and ... mostly I'm terrified that I'll write this and it will be pointless and will run me into a dead end I can't get out of.

I don't really understand this fear. I mean, I do, I live with it, but at the same time when I shine an outside light on it I don't, because it makes no sense. This is what writing is! I'm okay with writing that may be crap on the sentence level, that I can fix in editing. I guess now I have to get okay with writing that may be crap on the structural level, plot dead ends and contradicted character development and all of that.

Write to find out.

Dammit.

Also, I don't mind naming characters but I hate naming a whole bunch of them at once, and if my protagonist is going to have a family they do kind of need names.

... which leads down the rabbit-hole of naming conventions, and honorifics, and all of that. Bleh.

Comments

[okrablossom]

I wrote all these words the morning we were unable to have a writing get-together and I think I'm going to have to trash them, sort of go back to right before them, a scene where I have the antagonist make a demand of the protagonist, and change that, then write it all out again, very differently. I have pretty much been putting it off since the day after I did all the writing. Good luck with getting yourself to write out the scene!

Also, I miss the Royal Tea Latte. That was excellent.

[jazzfish]

Argh. Good luck, yourself!

I suspect that I need to sit down and brainstorm out a general direction for the plot, which is a thing that I always have to do and always forget about. I may find all the details in the process of writing, but the general idea of what to write is something I always have to work out beforehand.

I had not tried a Royal Tea Latte until this week, and, agreed, it's quite excellent. Not gonna displace their London Fogs (Blenz is about the only place I can get a London Fog that I really like) but tasty!

[northboundtrain]

When I write (I've been in a "lull" for ~18-20 months) I'm very much a pants-er, and I mostly write out scenes that I have no idea where they're headed. I remember one time writing a line, stopping about a very minor, throwaway character that I'd just that moment invented, going "huh" and then continuing on. That one line led to the rest of the scene, which opened up a whole new aspect of the story, which eventually gave me a clue as to how this thing was going to end (even though I'd already sketched out the epilogue). Other times a character says something as a throw-away that I later pick up on and opens up a whole new side of the character I never even imagined existed. Those are the moments I live for when writing; they amaze and astonish and delight me.

I'm currently (for some definition of currently) writing the connection between where I'd left off in the story and a scene I felt compelled to write out of chronological sequence. And there's something weird going on between one of the main characters and the character from the aforementioned "huh" scene that I don't know what it is, though I have a vague idea. I can't wait to find out!

[northboundtrain]

For this story, I only wrote one scene that I totally scrapped. It was a great scene that could have led to much drama, but it was drama I specifically did not want in the story. I just now realized that the weirdness I mentioned above may turn out to be part of the same thing. But it feels different enough that it may survive.

This is a somewhat smutty story, so it will likely never see the light of day (at least under my name, while my parents live). At 70k words, it's about 50-60% done.

[reedrover]

You might consider using temporary names for the family. Call them Joe, Bob, Kel, etc. until they have enough of a character for you to know their names... or until you have enough of a world and convention to know how the names should sound or which honorifics might apply.

[jazzfish]

The annoying thing is, I do know how the names should sound! And (probably) what honorifics apply, unless I redo them again. It's just surprisingly difficult/stressful to come up with a half dozen or so that are different enough that you can tell them apart but still related.

Since this is the only culture that I know how the names should sound, though, I'll likely try placeholder-names if and when I need to introduce more than a couple of characters at a time later on. Not sure how it will work: I suspect I may need a 'real' name to hang a character on. But it's worth a shot.

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

Fear sucks. And writing seems to be FULL of fear, doesn't it?

::HUGS:: You're an awesome writer. Trust yourself.

[jazzfish]

Thanks. There is other stuff going on as well, which I had ought to get out (basically: my process is not what i think it is, and i actually do require some amount of planning / knowing where i'm going before writing), but that just transfers the fear to a whole different part of the process. *sigh*