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mary had a little lamb / disregard previous life
-I have shelved this post several times in the last week or so and still hate posting it, at least on dw. NO MUST PASSAGG HARDER.
So anyway the reason I've not been blogging or anything else is that I got eaten by words. This happens sometimes, but I'm not used to it lasting for more than a week or so; this time it was a little over a month, squeezed me for over 40k, and obv this is not at all unusual by any reasonable metric of what a writer can do with a month (oh, but after ignoring NaNo there is nothing left to do in the fanfic calendar except for ignoring yuletide). It's just not happened to me before. I've been ticking over at about 70-80k a year. I am used to having few enough words that I must make them all count and make them all pretty, and I am used to them being worth time over everything because they don't last. And suddenly there I was alternating between effortless 3k days and no-words horrible emotional crash days because there was nothing else happening to support all this (i mean, me) when the words ran out. Sometime last week, I just realised I was done, mostly out of pissiness because two back-to-back 3k days had left me with some finished headcanon dreck that had all of one good line in it and what the fuck, if finishing stuff isn't even a thing any more then ugh why, and at some point one has to just quit and go out and let material build up to simmering point again. (And line-edit. god.)
I'm content with it being one big learning curve; the wordbrain gradually learns to lift bigger, pointier objects, and while one can't expect them to be big enough to be worth much of anything until you're in your 40s, at least you can enjoy the steady improvement. But this is something beyond what I am used to and that feels so non-incremental that right now I am having to reevaluate a few long-held ground assumptions about both the words and myself. I mean, given the evidence, i am just. not an adventurous person. just look at this. Give me an empty month and the best I can do with it is move words from one black hole to a different one and that is all. I've not even been walking or running. I dropped my exercise routines, my coursera thing, and to a large extent my friends, for those every-other 3k days. I'd look up and find that there was no milk and no clean underwear. The first thing that ever really hooked me about writing was the evidence it left of my time; but that kind of obsessiveness, in these circumstances, is also self-diminishing. (In other circumstances, it's been great. FFEX in 2011, I was working two jobs and still pulled out over 20k that April. More life tends to make writing healthier for me. I badly need those external anchors I've not been fighting for because I was too intently laying down internal ones.) It's made my me-ness wither to the point of approaching agoraphobia; what am I even supposed to be doing in the real world, etc.
re. learning process; this is more than fits into a normal incremental view of how the wordbrain changes. The thing is, I am used to thinking that I'm not naturally good at any part of this (except for the line-editing), just intent on trying hard in order to get ideas to come together and do horrible things. I started fairly late (17, and it remained mostly an erratic on-off thing until I was nearly 24). I'm not very interested in plot, especially not big ones - I like good prose, loaded details, and metasmartassery. I'm not here to tell stories, I'm here to milk the line-level dry and throw ideas at each other until they break. I often have a hard time even coming up with a plot that is capable of handwaving hard enough to let me get away with whateveritis that was really the point all along for me. Plot is this weird belief mechanism that readers engage in because they can't believe that you would actually be forcing tens of thousands of words of horrible metaporn on them without there being one. It is, at best, emergent.
Anyway. I expect to slowly learn to lift bigger things more easily, and to try out ever more tools from the ragbag of different verbal and conceptual skills that constitutes prose writing, some of which will work out first try, most of which will not. But I feel like something more than that just happened, not to but through me, and I can't even point to any one thing that demonstrates what I even mean because it is all process, this whole words coming out with no end thing where defeating one loose end just generates emotional grist for more words. It feels suspiciously easy in a way that is not going to last past the next brick wall, and probably won't last until tomorrow morning, and as I said, I already 'stopped' in that it can't be a priority any more.
I am worried. About what there is left/how empty the mental tank feels/if it has an empty. (What if I'm not learning/reading enough rn to alchemise into the next bout of obsession?) About the life I am failing at having.
I think I deleted most of everything I ever put in this post because it didn't matter.
So anyway the reason I've not been blogging or anything else is that I got eaten by words. This happens sometimes, but I'm not used to it lasting for more than a week or so; this time it was a little over a month, squeezed me for over 40k, and obv this is not at all unusual by any reasonable metric of what a writer can do with a month (oh, but after ignoring NaNo there is nothing left to do in the fanfic calendar except for ignoring yuletide). It's just not happened to me before. I've been ticking over at about 70-80k a year. I am used to having few enough words that I must make them all count and make them all pretty, and I am used to them being worth time over everything because they don't last. And suddenly there I was alternating between effortless 3k days and no-words horrible emotional crash days because there was nothing else happening to support all this (i mean, me) when the words ran out. Sometime last week, I just realised I was done, mostly out of pissiness because two back-to-back 3k days had left me with some finished headcanon dreck that had all of one good line in it and what the fuck, if finishing stuff isn't even a thing any more then ugh why, and at some point one has to just quit and go out and let material build up to simmering point again. (And line-edit. god.)
I'm content with it being one big learning curve; the wordbrain gradually learns to lift bigger, pointier objects, and while one can't expect them to be big enough to be worth much of anything until you're in your 40s, at least you can enjoy the steady improvement. But this is something beyond what I am used to and that feels so non-incremental that right now I am having to reevaluate a few long-held ground assumptions about both the words and myself. I mean, given the evidence, i am just. not an adventurous person. just look at this. Give me an empty month and the best I can do with it is move words from one black hole to a different one and that is all. I've not even been walking or running. I dropped my exercise routines, my coursera thing, and to a large extent my friends, for those every-other 3k days. I'd look up and find that there was no milk and no clean underwear. The first thing that ever really hooked me about writing was the evidence it left of my time; but that kind of obsessiveness, in these circumstances, is also self-diminishing. (In other circumstances, it's been great. FFEX in 2011, I was working two jobs and still pulled out over 20k that April. More life tends to make writing healthier for me. I badly need those external anchors I've not been fighting for because I was too intently laying down internal ones.) It's made my me-ness wither to the point of approaching agoraphobia; what am I even supposed to be doing in the real world, etc.
re. learning process; this is more than fits into a normal incremental view of how the wordbrain changes. The thing is, I am used to thinking that I'm not naturally good at any part of this (except for the line-editing), just intent on trying hard in order to get ideas to come together and do horrible things. I started fairly late (17, and it remained mostly an erratic on-off thing until I was nearly 24). I'm not very interested in plot, especially not big ones - I like good prose, loaded details, and metasmartassery. I'm not here to tell stories, I'm here to milk the line-level dry and throw ideas at each other until they break. I often have a hard time even coming up with a plot that is capable of handwaving hard enough to let me get away with whateveritis that was really the point all along for me. Plot is this weird belief mechanism that readers engage in because they can't believe that you would actually be forcing tens of thousands of words of horrible metaporn on them without there being one. It is, at best, emergent.
Anyway. I expect to slowly learn to lift bigger things more easily, and to try out ever more tools from the ragbag of different verbal and conceptual skills that constitutes prose writing, some of which will work out first try, most of which will not. But I feel like something more than that just happened, not to but through me, and I can't even point to any one thing that demonstrates what I even mean because it is all process, this whole words coming out with no end thing where defeating one loose end just generates emotional grist for more words. It feels suspiciously easy in a way that is not going to last past the next brick wall, and probably won't last until tomorrow morning, and as I said, I already 'stopped' in that it can't be a priority any more.
I am worried. About what there is left/how empty the mental tank feels/if it has an empty. (What if I'm not learning/reading enough rn to alchemise into the next bout of obsession?) About the life I am failing at having.
I think I deleted most of everything I ever put in this post because it didn't matter.
no subject
Doing a bit of navel-gazing here, once I learned how to simply throw out words instead of thinking about them, I think I got a lot better at them. I still cut chunks, and I tweak things here and there, but I like not having time to second-guess myself, which tends to slow me down when I am without deadlines. However, my process does not work for everyone.
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I am reaaaaally tight about line-editing when I give myself half a chance to be, and in that respect I like having time to second-guess myself, for it is in second guessing that much of the magic happens. It's a very different mode to churning out copy and hey wouldn't it be great if I could push a button and make either one of them happen whenever I wanted it to? Oh brain :( At least I do internal-deadline pretty well just by starting to feel bad/frustrated/guilty if I've been working on any one thing for 'too long' (which is by no means a good thing, as some of my more popular fics were slow, many-months-long processes even though two of those were under 10k.)
no subject
no subject