I’ve decided to break nearly a decade of writer’s block by joining NaNoWriMo. Technically I’ve written quite a bit — 250 posts here on LiveJournal, 1000+ posts at K-Squared Ramblings, hundreds of articles about Flash comics, the Alternate Browser Alliance website, etc. But aside from some Literary Guild projects back in college, I can only think of two works of fiction that I’ve finished since 1996: one short story and one short-short story.
Part of the problem is just getting started. I’ll have an idea but decide it’s not worth writing about, or I won’t have any ideas at all. I started a couple of fanfics, but they petered out when I realized I had a setting, but no plot.
I still didn’t have any ideas for Nanowrimo. I figured I’d just start writing and see what happened. Maybe it’ll be total crap, maybe it’ll be 50,000 words that I can chop down to a decent 10,000-word story. I started a day late, but managed to get 1150 words last night. I’m still trying to nail down the genre, when/where it’s set, the main character’s background. I have no idea where it’s going. But it’s two pages, and I made myself write description and narration instead of just dialogue. (That’s always been my Achilles heel with writing — I tend to fall back on dialogue and end up with something that looks like a script in prose format.)
Word count: 1150
I think that’s probably the single most significant factor that prevents me from writing the fiction I want to write, or very similar to it. I know what good narration and description look like, really, I think, I just have a very hard time generating it… the details are never specific enough to be distinctive and interesting, or there aren’t enough details, or it feels forced. Blech. I love my dialogue, though.
Yeah, I’m seeing that in what I’ve been writing. One advantage of Nano is that it’s forcing me to just write it and not worry too much about the quality of the prose. If it’s worth keeping, I can always go back and rewrite.
If you haven’t read it already, pick up the Salmon of Doubt some time. It’s a collection of essays, journal entries, etc. by Douglas Adams published posthumously, and it includes a few unpolished chapters of what would have been the next Dirk Gently novel. There are two things of particular interest to this discussion–the first thing is that in one essay, Adams talks about somehow getting access to a first-draft version of a work-in-progress by one of his favorite authors and being surprised at how different it was from the final products he was accustomed to. The other interesting thing is that many of the descriptive paragraphs in the unfinished Dirk Gently were clearly placeholders to be filled with more specific and interesting details later. And Adams’ finished work always has striking, hilariously well-chosen details.
So I guess even the best writers need to just get a structure down and fill in most of the interesting details during revision. I can never seem to remember that when I’m actually trying to write something.