Multum in parvo
Had a thought as I was falling asleep and am determined to get this one back.
It was something to do with Jane Austen and her bit of ivory 'on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour'...
Aha. That was it.
I was fretting over my fic and being fettered by the need to limit my vocabulary to that of the characters in our Dark Age canon. I have stacks of story ideas at the moment but am finding it hard to express them in 'proper' words. They look great as notes and I can see them in my head but oh dear, I so need to go and do a lot more reading to try to find new ways of expressing them, I am getting so fed up with the logistics of speech and sounds and movement and of course with having so few words for the relevant anatomical bits!
But then again. JA managed very well in her limited compass. (With no anatomical bits on show at all.) And some of the finest music ever composed was created within the confines of very strict traditions and rules and the technical constraints of the instruments (or voices) for which it was written... Byrd, for example. Or Bach. If you're good enough at what you do, you don't actually need to throw the rules out of the window, you can subvert and transcend them from the inside.
I could of course cheat and opt to write from the POV of the Omniscient Narrator, and I might try that just as a technical exercise sometime, but it doesn't ring true for me in my chosen universe. There is something about the immediacy of the canon that demands that fic be written from a POV that is firmly within that world, without anachronisms (well, OK, apart from the canon ones) and without knowing what happens next...
Perhaps I just need more practice. Maybe the ideas themselves are enough and I don't need anything more than very simple language to convey them.
Or maybe I should stop thinking about all this and just go and write something instead...
It was something to do with Jane Austen and her bit of ivory 'on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour'...
Aha. That was it.
I was fretting over my fic and being fettered by the need to limit my vocabulary to that of the characters in our Dark Age canon. I have stacks of story ideas at the moment but am finding it hard to express them in 'proper' words. They look great as notes and I can see them in my head but oh dear, I so need to go and do a lot more reading to try to find new ways of expressing them, I am getting so fed up with the logistics of speech and sounds and movement and of course with having so few words for the relevant anatomical bits!
But then again. JA managed very well in her limited compass. (With no anatomical bits on show at all.) And some of the finest music ever composed was created within the confines of very strict traditions and rules and the technical constraints of the instruments (or voices) for which it was written... Byrd, for example. Or Bach. If you're good enough at what you do, you don't actually need to throw the rules out of the window, you can subvert and transcend them from the inside.
I could of course cheat and opt to write from the POV of the Omniscient Narrator, and I might try that just as a technical exercise sometime, but it doesn't ring true for me in my chosen universe. There is something about the immediacy of the canon that demands that fic be written from a POV that is firmly within that world, without anachronisms (well, OK, apart from the canon ones) and without knowing what happens next...
Perhaps I just need more practice. Maybe the ideas themselves are enough and I don't need anything more than very simple language to convey them.
Or maybe I should stop thinking about all this and just go and write something instead...