Second guessing myself

[pegkerr]

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

Comments

[splagxna.livejournal.com]

this reminds me of what my roommate realized about her struggle to lose weight. she finally discerned that she was afraid to do it because it was easier to not be as much as she could be. i never quite understood what she was saying - but it resonates.

i wish you luck.