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Second guessing myself
Have been thinking about the ice palace book, and why I haven't been working on it. Figured some stuff out today. I found myself thinking, with more than a twinge of impatience, that I seem to be able to come up with more reasons not to be writing than any writer I know.
Part of it is just real life stuff. My computer crashed just after Wiscon, I lost my writing time when summer daycare costs went up and I had to go back to full time, Rob was working that crazy schedule, the girls have needed attention, I had a fun project that sucked away a lot of creative energy, the house is an attention hog. Etcetera, etcera. But I started thinking about it today, and came to the conclusion, it's more than that.
First of all there's an old problem that I've been aware of for quite a while. I've written two books, Emerald House Rising, and The Wild Swans. The first one I thought was a pretty respectable journeyman effort. Not spectacular, but perhaps a bit above average. The second one I really cared about, and I'm quite proud of it. In my more confident moods, I flip through it, and I think, you know, this is damned good. I've had readers praise both my books, but they're especially complimentary about Swans.
Well, that's terrific, yes? Every writer would like to be able to say that: "I wrote something excellent." But when you're a writer like me, who struggles with issues of self-confidence, it raises a particular problem that may not be immediately obvious, and it's this:
How can I possibly follow that? How do I move forward from that achievement? How do I do something even better? Can I? Or am I just a one-book (or in my case, a two-book) wonder?
As I said, I've been aware of this issue. I had actually started a prequel to Emerald House Rising, and I gave it up after 70 pages, thinking, "I don't want to do this, it's not fun. It's just not as good as Swans." I flailed around miserably for almost four years before I hit upon the idea for this ice palace book. And I was so excited when I started writing and the ideas seemed to be flowing. At last. I'm writing again. I haven't lost it after all.
But today, I realized that my back brain (as Lois calls the creative mostly unconscious part of the imagination) is avoiding writing because it's unhappy. The real life stuff has only been a convenient excuse. And it comes back to my old nemesis, plot.
I hate plotting, and I don't think I'm very good at it. Individual scenes I can write easily. Dialogue is a snap. Overall structure is much more difficult. Where are these characters going? I love thinking/talking about structure in other people's books, but seem to have a blind spot in my creative process when I attempt to dream up my own. Maybe the reason my second book was so much better than my first was that I stole someone else's plot!
Anyway: I was thinking structure today, and I saw consciously for the first time what my back brain probably realized a while ago: the plot structure to the ice palace book that I've constructed so far is much too similar to the plot structure of Emerald House Rising. And I don't mean that in a good way. Worse, I realize that I've duplicated some of my worst first-novel errors from that book. Like that the climax of both books is to get a group of people into an exotic place (literally, a palace in both books) and the villain explains to everyone his cunning plan. And gets defeated, and that releases the person close to the protagonist who is under a spell.
The more I thought about it, the more I saw structural similarities, one after another. And my reaction was my god . . . yuck! I don't want to do this all over again. It would be like chewing used chewing gum. I've done this already."
So what the hell do I do?
The individual scenes I've written so far are good. I read bits of the book at a reading at Nimbus, and people liked them. What I have to figure out here is whether this is just I'm-in-the-middle-of-a-book-and-that-means-I want-to-do-something-else-hell-even-sorting-socks-would-be-more-interesting? Or does this mean I-have-to-completely-rethink-everything? Maybe even throw most of my plot away and figure out how to start all over again? There's this architect with a daughter and there's this ice palace, and there's summer and winter magic. And???
This is awfully discouraging.
Peg
Part of it is just real life stuff. My computer crashed just after Wiscon, I lost my writing time when summer daycare costs went up and I had to go back to full time, Rob was working that crazy schedule, the girls have needed attention, I had a fun project that sucked away a lot of creative energy, the house is an attention hog. Etcetera, etcera. But I started thinking about it today, and came to the conclusion, it's more than that.
First of all there's an old problem that I've been aware of for quite a while. I've written two books, Emerald House Rising, and The Wild Swans. The first one I thought was a pretty respectable journeyman effort. Not spectacular, but perhaps a bit above average. The second one I really cared about, and I'm quite proud of it. In my more confident moods, I flip through it, and I think, you know, this is damned good. I've had readers praise both my books, but they're especially complimentary about Swans.
Well, that's terrific, yes? Every writer would like to be able to say that: "I wrote something excellent." But when you're a writer like me, who struggles with issues of self-confidence, it raises a particular problem that may not be immediately obvious, and it's this:
How can I possibly follow that? How do I move forward from that achievement? How do I do something even better? Can I? Or am I just a one-book (or in my case, a two-book) wonder?
As I said, I've been aware of this issue. I had actually started a prequel to Emerald House Rising, and I gave it up after 70 pages, thinking, "I don't want to do this, it's not fun. It's just not as good as Swans." I flailed around miserably for almost four years before I hit upon the idea for this ice palace book. And I was so excited when I started writing and the ideas seemed to be flowing. At last. I'm writing again. I haven't lost it after all.
But today, I realized that my back brain (as Lois calls the creative mostly unconscious part of the imagination) is avoiding writing because it's unhappy. The real life stuff has only been a convenient excuse. And it comes back to my old nemesis, plot.
I hate plotting, and I don't think I'm very good at it. Individual scenes I can write easily. Dialogue is a snap. Overall structure is much more difficult. Where are these characters going? I love thinking/talking about structure in other people's books, but seem to have a blind spot in my creative process when I attempt to dream up my own. Maybe the reason my second book was so much better than my first was that I stole someone else's plot!
Anyway: I was thinking structure today, and I saw consciously for the first time what my back brain probably realized a while ago: the plot structure to the ice palace book that I've constructed so far is much too similar to the plot structure of Emerald House Rising. And I don't mean that in a good way. Worse, I realize that I've duplicated some of my worst first-novel errors from that book. Like that the climax of both books is to get a group of people into an exotic place (literally, a palace in both books) and the villain explains to everyone his cunning plan. And gets defeated, and that releases the person close to the protagonist who is under a spell.
The more I thought about it, the more I saw structural similarities, one after another. And my reaction was my god . . . yuck! I don't want to do this all over again. It would be like chewing used chewing gum. I've done this already."
So what the hell do I do?
The individual scenes I've written so far are good. I read bits of the book at a reading at Nimbus, and people liked them. What I have to figure out here is whether this is just I'm-in-the-middle-of-a-book-and-that-means-I want-to-do-something-else-hell-even-sorting-socks-would-be-more-interesting? Or does this mean I-have-to-completely-rethink-everything? Maybe even throw most of my plot away and figure out how to start all over again? There's this architect with a daughter and there's this ice palace, and there's summer and winter magic. And???
This is awfully discouraging.
Peg
no subject
I'm very nearly there now with the novel I started in January (which is frustrating because if I'm lucky, I've got 20,000 words on it). I haven't touched it in two months because... because there's the voice in the back of my head saying, It sucks! and telling me I need to rethink it, re do it, or give up. Heck, I wanted to rewrite GM from the ground up a month ago even though in January I was ready to just shove it out the door and hope that it didn't trip over its shoelaces.
I think that sometimes you just have to write it. You can go back and fix problems, but sometimes you never know if the problems you see now really are problems until you actually get to the end. And if you're not at the end, then there's still an opportunity to change the problems you see coming up.
My guess is, though, that you'll get to the end and go back through and realize that you knew what you were doing all along, even if you didn't trust that initially.
As far as re-using plot/theme... it happens. We write the things we want to read and we write the things that we care about. You can fix the 'first-novel errors' when you revise. You can't ever get to 'revise' (not really) unless you finish.
Granted, if you do feel like you're writing the same novel all over again and you don't want to, then you've got a whole other problem that may lead back to the "I'm a third/halfway into it and it sucks" problem that lots of people run into...
Not sure if that helps or not... *hug*
no subject
The best piece of advice I ever got came from Greg Frost (he'd gotten it from someone else): Give yourself permission to write crap.
Because the draft is almost always crap. But if you don't finish a draft, you can't do a rewrite; and fix the problems--I've also been told the problems are easier to see if you have a WHOLE draft. So maybe you could write using a basic plot, and then on a rewrite add in more complexity.
I find the whole "writing crap" thing difficult, but rewarding in terms of word count. I goad myself with the promise of rewrites.
The new book won't be WILD SWANS. All books are different, and I think they have to be written in different ways. Maybe you could think about ways in which this book is different from the previous two, and then the similarities won't seem to glaring.
You probably know all this already, but I like people to tell me things more than once...