If I have a plot, does that mean I need to write it? [personal stuff; feel free to skip]
This ain't flocked cus it ain't secret, but also, it's just me rambling about personal crap, so feel free to move on. ;) No awesome geeky fandom content here!
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So...once upon a time, I kind of wanted to be a writer, because I like writing and it sounded more fun than a real job. And I was sort of good at it, at least good enough to ace my pointless undergrad creative writing degree and sail through my pointless masters, before landing in the real world and discovering neither made me employable in any sense of the word. (I am too hard on myself; I knew exactly how ten-a-penny and useless they would prove to be before I took them, but I loved writing, and it sounded more fun than a real degree.)
(Let us also acknowledge and move past my simultaneous desire to badmouth my own academic achievements as worthless in order to prove I am a realist at the same time I hate the realist worldview that demands it and wonder why an arts degree in writing is considered less impressive than an arts degree in drawing, painting, music or film direction.)
So anyway. I love writing, but fuck me if I can handle plot. I hate plot. I'm bad at plot. All my plots require long, drawn out backstory explanations that are...boring and confuse people. The plot and I are nemeses.
And that's when writing stops being fun and starts being work and I tell myself I'm not giving up, I'm just...wandering away for a while few months four years.
(OMFG, srsly, I got my masters almost five years ago, I was 21, I was a baby - the youngest on the course and I don't think I had a teacher who didn't remark on that; it felt like there was absolutely no hurry and then suddenly shit happens, I've lived in three different countries, gotten married, am closer to my 27th birthday than my 26th, and know more about mental illness - not mine - than I ever, ever wanted to, from both ends of the system. I wonder where the time went and then I think, that's where it went. On my unspectacular, unique life. I wanted to write a book. I never had the time plot.)
Last week, I had an awful week. It sucked ass. And, for some reason, it gave me a plot. I had actual ideas about...not the nitty gritty detail plot; the sleight-of-hand that makes "and then they went to this place and found this clue!" moments seem organic rather than arbitrary, and I'm sure that will terrify me still. But about how to hang the idea I've had for two years on an honest-to-god sequence of events that involves four distinct protagonists and parallel plotlines and revelations and events. It has, I hope, a perspective-shifting endpoint, and characters who, through their existence, ask interesting questions. And the only human is dead and stuck in a robot body, which possibly I should address, but then again maybe not.
The point is, I'm kind of terrified. Cus now I have to write it. Which, if I do it, is going to be amazing. Cus I love writing. I love it. I always forget until I'm doing it and then...I have no words to explain how fantastic it is.
But now I don't have an excuse; now I might fail; now the way it is in my head might not be the way it is on paper.
I mean, I'm okay. I'm going to try and do this; I want to - that's half the reason I'm posting, diary-style, here. To remind myself I can.
But I feel like I'm about to jump off a cliff.
***
So...once upon a time, I kind of wanted to be a writer, because I like writing and it sounded more fun than a real job. And I was sort of good at it, at least good enough to ace my pointless undergrad creative writing degree and sail through my pointless masters, before landing in the real world and discovering neither made me employable in any sense of the word. (I am too hard on myself; I knew exactly how ten-a-penny and useless they would prove to be before I took them, but I loved writing, and it sounded more fun than a real degree.)
(Let us also acknowledge and move past my simultaneous desire to badmouth my own academic achievements as worthless in order to prove I am a realist at the same time I hate the realist worldview that demands it and wonder why an arts degree in writing is considered less impressive than an arts degree in drawing, painting, music or film direction.)
So anyway. I love writing, but fuck me if I can handle plot. I hate plot. I'm bad at plot. All my plots require long, drawn out backstory explanations that are...boring and confuse people. The plot and I are nemeses.
And that's when writing stops being fun and starts being work and I tell myself I'm not giving up, I'm just...wandering away for a while few months four years.
(OMFG, srsly, I got my masters almost five years ago, I was 21, I was a baby - the youngest on the course and I don't think I had a teacher who didn't remark on that; it felt like there was absolutely no hurry and then suddenly shit happens, I've lived in three different countries, gotten married, am closer to my 27th birthday than my 26th, and know more about mental illness - not mine - than I ever, ever wanted to, from both ends of the system. I wonder where the time went and then I think, that's where it went. On my unspectacular, unique life. I wanted to write a book. I never had the time plot.)
Last week, I had an awful week. It sucked ass. And, for some reason, it gave me a plot. I had actual ideas about...not the nitty gritty detail plot; the sleight-of-hand that makes "and then they went to this place and found this clue!" moments seem organic rather than arbitrary, and I'm sure that will terrify me still. But about how to hang the idea I've had for two years on an honest-to-god sequence of events that involves four distinct protagonists and parallel plotlines and revelations and events. It has, I hope, a perspective-shifting endpoint, and characters who, through their existence, ask interesting questions. And the only human is dead and stuck in a robot body, which possibly I should address, but then again maybe not.
The point is, I'm kind of terrified. Cus now I have to write it. Which, if I do it, is going to be amazing. Cus I love writing. I love it. I always forget until I'm doing it and then...I have no words to explain how fantastic it is.
But now I don't have an excuse; now I might fail; now the way it is in my head might not be the way it is on paper.
I mean, I'm okay. I'm going to try and do this; I want to - that's half the reason I'm posting, diary-style, here. To remind myself I can.
But I feel like I'm about to jump off a cliff.