![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Metafiction and writer's block
Jan. 9th, 2004 06:01 pmI have been thinking about Solveig, cautiously, in the back of my mind. Sort of watching her from the corner of my eye so that she doesn't realize I'm looking at her and skitter away. Not that I'm doing much to chase her, actually. I haven't sat down to peck at anything on the novel for over a month.
See, I think that Solveig is maddeningly elusive because she doesn't know what she wants to do with her life--well, no, she sort of knows what she wants to do with her life, but this isn't it. She wants to design lovely jewel-like houses, bungalows like they built in Minneapolis in 1910, but somehow, without really meaning to, she ended up taking an architecture job where she's designing souless shopping malls. And she has a kid and a mortgage, and she can never quite catch up with her bills, and so she feels kinda stuck in that job. It all sort of depresses her, so she doesn't like to think about it.
You see what's going on here, of course. I'm meta-channeling myself and my own life. And just like Solveig doesn't like to look at her own life and face the awful realization this is my life, which I chose by not really choosing, but by simply going along the path of least resistance, I'm the same way. Which is probably why my back brain has been balking at writing this book.
Writing as therapy. Sheesh.
I will have to visit the site next week, and that, in a way, feels like a commitment to the project. I realize that I haven't quite convinced myself that this book is going to happen. I really have lost faith in myself as a writer, and I am trying to find my way back to it, and it's not easy. And another thing blocking me is the overpowering conviction that Solveig and her life are just so overpoweringly boring that no one will want to read about her--which is, I suppose, a reflection that my own life seems overpoweringly boring to me.
So that's what I've figured out.
Sometimes insight is a real bitch.
See, I think that Solveig is maddeningly elusive because she doesn't know what she wants to do with her life--well, no, she sort of knows what she wants to do with her life, but this isn't it. She wants to design lovely jewel-like houses, bungalows like they built in Minneapolis in 1910, but somehow, without really meaning to, she ended up taking an architecture job where she's designing souless shopping malls. And she has a kid and a mortgage, and she can never quite catch up with her bills, and so she feels kinda stuck in that job. It all sort of depresses her, so she doesn't like to think about it.
You see what's going on here, of course. I'm meta-channeling myself and my own life. And just like Solveig doesn't like to look at her own life and face the awful realization this is my life, which I chose by not really choosing, but by simply going along the path of least resistance, I'm the same way. Which is probably why my back brain has been balking at writing this book.
Writing as therapy. Sheesh.
I will have to visit the site next week, and that, in a way, feels like a commitment to the project. I realize that I haven't quite convinced myself that this book is going to happen. I really have lost faith in myself as a writer, and I am trying to find my way back to it, and it's not easy. And another thing blocking me is the overpowering conviction that Solveig and her life are just so overpoweringly boring that no one will want to read about her--which is, I suppose, a reflection that my own life seems overpoweringly boring to me.
So that's what I've figured out.
Sometimes insight is a real bitch.
