Writing
I'm working on 3 things right now:
- Editing my short story about stalking Liam Neeson. I wrote it for a class last spring and it fell together pretty well, but it kind of diluted the main moment that the story revolved around. Basically, it's about these 3 girls who go on a stakeout to see if Liam Neeson walks like a penguin, and they're hiding on the balcony of his hotel room waiting for him to come home. And I wrote that, and he comes home and they're like "omg Liam Neeson" and then he leaves. And it lacks excitement. I've been trying to rewrite it so that he sees them, stares for a moment, and then shakes his head and walks away (like he thinks he's having a drunken hallucination or something) but it's just not coming together. I don't know how to write big moments unless they're in script form. This is how it would go in a script:
Liam Neeson sees the girls. He stares at them, baffled.
LIAM NEESON
(beat)
I really must stop drinking.
This is all I've managed to write in the story:We were stuck. A snowbank had, indeed, formed around us. The entire balcony was filled as high as it would go, and we were in it from the neck down. We looked at each other in horror.
We all began to tap on the door, panicked.
“Hello?” we yelled. “Liam Neeson? Can you help us get out?” We became hysterical, pounding on the door with our mittens in what was surely a vain effort.
I'm like, what now? I can't figure out how to write the action of Liam Neeson reappearing and seeing the girls. It's a single moment, you know? I don't know how to accomplish a moment where it's like, you snap your finger and it happens. Does anyone have any tips on doing that? - An article/blog post reviewing my 5 favorite shows of 2011. I'm always so uncomfortable writing reviews/articles...it's just really not my thing. I'm totally incapable of passing judgment in my writing without writing like, 18 paragraphs where I go back and forth trying to make a single point. So I'm trying to force myself to be concise by making sections for favorite character, quote, etc. I really want to get my stupid TV blog back up and running because I really do enjoy writing about TV. I just suck at feeling confident about the things I'm writing. If I don't feel like I'm in my element, I just feel completely useless.
- A story about a schizophrenic woman who hallucinates herself writing a book and getting it picked up by a publisher, and she kind of gets these hints that her husband is patronizing her but she doesn't realize until the end that it's because she imagined writing the book and that she's completely lost it. I have only written like, 3 paragraphs of this, but it's just something I'm playing around with. Yet another thing that I could write much better in script form, but I'm trying to get away from the habit of doing that.