Nobody said the narrow roads had to be so hard
"There is no wide road which leads to the muses." - Prospertius
I've spent my whole life wanting to be a writer.
I wrote a book when I was six about a clown named Bubbles who was kidnapped and saved by her cat, Sprinkles.
I would get ridiculously excited when we had creative writing assignments in school, and never failed to get an "A" on them.
When I was in the 10th grade, I discovered Fantasy. Not that I hadn't always known about princess stories and fairy tales - but I discovered that I could find ways to still love it as adult. And through the world of text-based roleplaying games, my eyes were opened to a new genre that reached me on a level that nothing had before. And I started to write, and the words flowed more smoothly and more quickly than anything else had.
I wrote The Guardian Quest over the course of the next three years. My writing style was disjoined, contradictory and unpolished. But I loved those characters. When I finished it, I knew how terrible it was, but I loved it in it's own special way. I wrote The Cristal Keepers after that, as a sequel, involving the second generation of the characters from the first book. It was better - I had learned some about how to write and how to outline and plot and develop a character. But it wasn't very good yet, either.
I wrote The Glass Window over the period of the last two years of college and the first year here in Indiana. It was the first thing I had written that I was really proud of. I love my characters, because the story was one I had borrowed from my time roleplaying - Aria was my alter-ego then, and this was her story, the story about someone who had to leave the place she knew, and come back to start over with the people she loved. It grew from that story into something so much more. And while I know there is still a lot I can do to improve it, I feel very strongly about its potential, and I am really truly proud of it.
And now, I have so many ideas - so many stories that I want to write. My documents folder is filled with stories I began and never came back to. I have a writing program that is basically a virtual three-ring binder, I can create separate documents for outlines and character descriptions and notes, as well as chapters and scenes. I can scan in sketches and keep them there as well. I have three of these "binders" on my computer: One for my version of the Princess and the Pea (which is decent, but will probably be deleted before long). One for a neat story idea I had for NaNoWriMo a few years ago that I'm still working on, about two teenage girls who live in a small Indiana town - Foley can hear ghosts and Geraldine is a witch, and they have to find an old spellbook that belonged to a witch who died 50 years ago and hid it somewhere in the town before the bad guys do. And then, there's the Element Magic series.
Five books. Five plots. At least two dozen fully fleshed out characters, and a dozen more secondary characters in my head. I know them all, and what's more - I know intimately the world they inhabit. The 8 kingdoms - I've planned and plotted out each of their histories, their governments. I have notes about magic and the kinds of ways it gets used by the different people who can wield it. Not to mention notes about class structures and predjudices, about the mythical creatures who are still in the world although they choose to live separate from people. It is truly an epic undertaking, and I am completely excited about the idea of this series.
But I can't write it. I can't put my fingers to the keyboard and make words come out of it. It just...isn't happening. And I get frustrated, and so I go away from it for a while. I come back to it, refamiliarize myself with my idea and come up with so much more - but it never gets put into actual story. It's all just ideas. And ideas are great - but I've been working on the IDEA for this series for over a year and a half now.
This is not about me having writer's block - I can deal with writer's block. It's more than a frustration with the lack of words happening. Because I know I can make them happen. I don't want to make them, necessarily, I'd rather not force it - but I AM capable of it.
"So what brings this on now?" You say.
Sarah.
Sarah, I know, because this will get crossposted to facebook, that you will read this. Please, in no way, take this personal, or as an attack, or anything in any way against you.
Sarah has written more, in the last three weeks, than I have in a year and a half. And yeah, her writing is choppy and unformatted and rushed and sometimes a little disjointed - and she knows that, but she's writing, and going back and refining it. She started in one place and ended up somewhere totally different, and has come up with a story that is as coherent and interesting as anything I could have come up with, and she's just making it up as she goes.
Why does this frustrate me so much?
Why does it frustrate me that people like Sarah, like Stefanie Meyer or even J.K. Rowling to some degree can sit down at a keyboard and make magic happen when they have never done it before - never tried to do it, never intended to do it, and I can't - and I want it so bad. I want to be able to write like that - to just sit down and click away - but it just isn't there - and I hate it. I used to be like that - it used to just...flow. And I think that taking more time to process the idea before I start writing has helped the quality of the writing itself, but it sure isn't helping the quantity. I don't want to resent how far Sarah has come in what she's doing, but I do and I hate that I do.
What's more - she's getting her friends, her family - to read her story. I have been trying for three years to get my mother to read mine. She has had it in her nightstand. She's read...a few pages. I have asked people to read it, and they have not. I have emailed copies to people and never heard back. One friend, one person from high school as read it and given me a critique. Sarah even has a copy. I can write - I can write well, and I know that, but I...I got rejected from a frickin fanfiction website for crying out loud, because of "characterization" or something like that when I know I wrote the Harry Potter characters well because I almost wrote EXACTLY some of the same scenarios that ended up in the ACTUAL seventh Harry Potter book! And I'm sorry if I don't write "Harry Potter plays Truth or Dare with Mary Sue" fanfiction, I just wanted something fun to do to take my mind of writer's block and excuse me if I still tried to do it well.
It's like - it's like someone who's taken guitar lessons their whole life, who isn't great but he's good, and he plays a show every night of the week. And his friends all think it's really cool that he's playing and asks him what songs he does and all this stuff, but never come see him play. But then, one day, one of his friends comes up to him and says, "Hey, Johnny just learned how to play guitar, and he's playing a show tomorrow! We're all going, want to come?" It doesn't matter if he plays better than Johnny or not, the point is that his friends will go see Johnny when they won't see him.
It is just. So. Frustrating. because I don't WANT to be petty about this, I want to be excited for Sarah that she is doing this, because I think it is awesome, I do! We'll sit here and bounce ideas back and forth, talk about her story, talk about my story, discuss her plot holes and what she should do differently and whether she's going too Buffy and the Mortal Instruments and whether I'm going too the X-Men go to Hogwarts...and I love that she has found so much enjoyment in something that I love so much. But I'm not going to lie, it hurts that her sister will call her the next day after Sarah sends her unfinished rough draft-version story to find out what happens next, and my own mother hasn't read the first chapter of the story I gave her three years ago.
There.
(as a side note, I started this note at...5:00 this afternoon. I am posting it at 10:15 pm. Also, i would like to apologize to LJ for the heinously long post, but I don't feel like cutting it.)
I've spent my whole life wanting to be a writer.
I wrote a book when I was six about a clown named Bubbles who was kidnapped and saved by her cat, Sprinkles.
I would get ridiculously excited when we had creative writing assignments in school, and never failed to get an "A" on them.
When I was in the 10th grade, I discovered Fantasy. Not that I hadn't always known about princess stories and fairy tales - but I discovered that I could find ways to still love it as adult. And through the world of text-based roleplaying games, my eyes were opened to a new genre that reached me on a level that nothing had before. And I started to write, and the words flowed more smoothly and more quickly than anything else had.
I wrote The Guardian Quest over the course of the next three years. My writing style was disjoined, contradictory and unpolished. But I loved those characters. When I finished it, I knew how terrible it was, but I loved it in it's own special way. I wrote The Cristal Keepers after that, as a sequel, involving the second generation of the characters from the first book. It was better - I had learned some about how to write and how to outline and plot and develop a character. But it wasn't very good yet, either.
I wrote The Glass Window over the period of the last two years of college and the first year here in Indiana. It was the first thing I had written that I was really proud of. I love my characters, because the story was one I had borrowed from my time roleplaying - Aria was my alter-ego then, and this was her story, the story about someone who had to leave the place she knew, and come back to start over with the people she loved. It grew from that story into something so much more. And while I know there is still a lot I can do to improve it, I feel very strongly about its potential, and I am really truly proud of it.
And now, I have so many ideas - so many stories that I want to write. My documents folder is filled with stories I began and never came back to. I have a writing program that is basically a virtual three-ring binder, I can create separate documents for outlines and character descriptions and notes, as well as chapters and scenes. I can scan in sketches and keep them there as well. I have three of these "binders" on my computer: One for my version of the Princess and the Pea (which is decent, but will probably be deleted before long). One for a neat story idea I had for NaNoWriMo a few years ago that I'm still working on, about two teenage girls who live in a small Indiana town - Foley can hear ghosts and Geraldine is a witch, and they have to find an old spellbook that belonged to a witch who died 50 years ago and hid it somewhere in the town before the bad guys do. And then, there's the Element Magic series.
Five books. Five plots. At least two dozen fully fleshed out characters, and a dozen more secondary characters in my head. I know them all, and what's more - I know intimately the world they inhabit. The 8 kingdoms - I've planned and plotted out each of their histories, their governments. I have notes about magic and the kinds of ways it gets used by the different people who can wield it. Not to mention notes about class structures and predjudices, about the mythical creatures who are still in the world although they choose to live separate from people. It is truly an epic undertaking, and I am completely excited about the idea of this series.
But I can't write it. I can't put my fingers to the keyboard and make words come out of it. It just...isn't happening. And I get frustrated, and so I go away from it for a while. I come back to it, refamiliarize myself with my idea and come up with so much more - but it never gets put into actual story. It's all just ideas. And ideas are great - but I've been working on the IDEA for this series for over a year and a half now.
This is not about me having writer's block - I can deal with writer's block. It's more than a frustration with the lack of words happening. Because I know I can make them happen. I don't want to make them, necessarily, I'd rather not force it - but I AM capable of it.
"So what brings this on now?" You say.
Sarah.
Sarah, I know, because this will get crossposted to facebook, that you will read this. Please, in no way, take this personal, or as an attack, or anything in any way against you.
Sarah has written more, in the last three weeks, than I have in a year and a half. And yeah, her writing is choppy and unformatted and rushed and sometimes a little disjointed - and she knows that, but she's writing, and going back and refining it. She started in one place and ended up somewhere totally different, and has come up with a story that is as coherent and interesting as anything I could have come up with, and she's just making it up as she goes.
Why does this frustrate me so much?
Why does it frustrate me that people like Sarah, like Stefanie Meyer or even J.K. Rowling to some degree can sit down at a keyboard and make magic happen when they have never done it before - never tried to do it, never intended to do it, and I can't - and I want it so bad. I want to be able to write like that - to just sit down and click away - but it just isn't there - and I hate it. I used to be like that - it used to just...flow. And I think that taking more time to process the idea before I start writing has helped the quality of the writing itself, but it sure isn't helping the quantity. I don't want to resent how far Sarah has come in what she's doing, but I do and I hate that I do.
What's more - she's getting her friends, her family - to read her story. I have been trying for three years to get my mother to read mine. She has had it in her nightstand. She's read...a few pages. I have asked people to read it, and they have not. I have emailed copies to people and never heard back. One friend, one person from high school as read it and given me a critique. Sarah even has a copy. I can write - I can write well, and I know that, but I...I got rejected from a frickin fanfiction website for crying out loud, because of "characterization" or something like that when I know I wrote the Harry Potter characters well because I almost wrote EXACTLY some of the same scenarios that ended up in the ACTUAL seventh Harry Potter book! And I'm sorry if I don't write "Harry Potter plays Truth or Dare with Mary Sue" fanfiction, I just wanted something fun to do to take my mind of writer's block and excuse me if I still tried to do it well.
It's like - it's like someone who's taken guitar lessons their whole life, who isn't great but he's good, and he plays a show every night of the week. And his friends all think it's really cool that he's playing and asks him what songs he does and all this stuff, but never come see him play. But then, one day, one of his friends comes up to him and says, "Hey, Johnny just learned how to play guitar, and he's playing a show tomorrow! We're all going, want to come?" It doesn't matter if he plays better than Johnny or not, the point is that his friends will go see Johnny when they won't see him.
It is just. So. Frustrating. because I don't WANT to be petty about this, I want to be excited for Sarah that she is doing this, because I think it is awesome, I do! We'll sit here and bounce ideas back and forth, talk about her story, talk about my story, discuss her plot holes and what she should do differently and whether she's going too Buffy and the Mortal Instruments and whether I'm going too the X-Men go to Hogwarts...and I love that she has found so much enjoyment in something that I love so much. But I'm not going to lie, it hurts that her sister will call her the next day after Sarah sends her unfinished rough draft-version story to find out what happens next, and my own mother hasn't read the first chapter of the story I gave her three years ago.
There.
(as a side note, I started this note at...5:00 this afternoon. I am posting it at 10:15 pm. Also, i would like to apologize to LJ for the heinously long post, but I don't feel like cutting it.)