September 2024 Update

Hello again everybody!

I’ve been a bit quiet this past month or so (more like 6+ weeks)…

That’s because I’ve actually been working – working on the writing, too, at least for most of it.

The rest has been spent battling the writing, haha. Most, if not all writers know this feeling in one form or another, whether it’s unknotting a difficult plot point or writing ourselves out of a corner, to actually being able to sit down and write at all. Sometimes the oppression of the white page is as bad as, as is sometimes my problem, a screen so full of words you don’t know where to fucking start during the revision process.

This past month or so I find myself in both these positions, because I am caught between two different works: my current (new) WIP, tentatively titled Discordia, and an older finished novella I’ve been sitting on for over 10 years called A Rose For The Damned, a kind of chimera of American Psycho (minus the boring bits, I hope) x Faust.

Discordia hit a bit of a wall because I became uncertain what my main character’s motives were, therefore causing me to doubt the overall theme.

A Rose For The Damned, for something I wrote and finished back in 2014, well before I was published, was surprisingly good and fairly well-written. However, there are large tracts where significant time spans were glommed over with more telling than showing; given the main character is frequently engaging in some rather nasty activities, I felt this is okay, as I didn’t want to have to go into detail every single time. Finding the balance is something that I’ve battled with before I’ve even applied my red editing pen to the page, let alone once I actually do. I fear massive rewrites, which wasn’t something I was looking for when I unearthed this novella from its digital grave: I wanted an almost ready-to-go novel so I could mimic other indie authors, like me, who just seem so goddamn productive (unlike me).

I suppose that’s my punishment for trying to find a shortcut, huh? Won’t make that mistake again.

But in both projects’ cases, there is a common element that is making both something of a battlefield: fear. Fear is present, I think, for so many – most, I’d argue – writers. In the case of Discordia, it’s fearing I’ll screw something up in the plot or characterisation that will require too much going back and fixing, but it’s inhibiting the flow and enjoyment of laying down that wonderful first draft. Now some of that fear I’ll chalk up to having too many projects either half-finished, or finished but with too many structural problems due to a lack of planning in advance – so that fear to some extent is more leading with caution, to plan as deeply as possible before committing words to the page. Sometimes that fear, however, that excessive planning which often goes counter to my spontaneous nature, is stopping me from making any progress beyond the first couple of chapters. This is probably the argument in the eternal war between the plotters and pantsers: which one is right?

I’d say a balance is the key, but finding it is half the battle. And I’m not generally known for being able to walk the knife-edge of balance particularly well.

I suppose perhaps my difficulties with Discordia, falling mainly within my actual practice than the ideas and story themselves, are probably the lesser of the two evils. I’d much rather avoid the problems of A Rose For The Damned and having to delete, rewrite and shuffle around parts of an entirely drafted manuscript. (I just thank my lucky stars this one is only 23K words, and not one of my other behemoths!)

With all that said, I feel I’ve made some progress with both manuscripts. Slow may be slow but it’s something, and I’m getting the catharsis I crave from the writing process.

I’ll talk more about this in future posts, as Discordia is a deeply personal story about letting go, how trying to escape one’s problems often becomes its own prison, and that old chestnut of being careful about what you wish for. Part of the current month’s work has helped me determine that I needn’t cut other themes out just to homogenise or highlight only one, especially when they work in synergy.

Life is messy, and so is writing, right?