25 listopadu

[ritaxis]

I missed Wednesday and Thursday. It was not just the holiday. It was also my stupid knee which hurts the most about an hour after I go to bed and so I don't sleep even in bed, which is unusual for me: usually my big sleep deprivation problem is that I can;'t bring myself to go to bed.

But today I wrote 2.8K and now it is 46K total and I have finished the Supernatural Event Which I Suppose Someone Could Pass Off As A Dream But It Has Far-reaching Repercussions and now we are back into Cinderella Mode leading up to The Pivotal Event In The Life Of The Music Tutor and The Need Fire! in opposite order.

My research, let me show you it, because it surely does not show on the page: today I had to read about wild boar, ethnobotany, Central European summer climate, febrifuges (that and ethnobotany were very frustrating searches), bracken, mushrooms of the wetland woods, and I forget what else.

This was after dedicating September and October to intensive research.

And I just found out that my after-Thanksgiving meal with my brother is being postponed till tomorrow, so I wil have another bout of writing later and see if between that and the rest of the weekend I can push past where I would have been if I had kept up the steady 2K every day without interruption.

In the last couple of days I have read some remarks about what distinguishes professional writing from not-professional writing and I believe my reaction was not helpful I am convinced at the moment that I have no ear and will never be able to see what is wrong with my writing. Actually, that is why I withdrew from trying to publish in the first place: it had gotten to the point where the very kind and explicitly meant-to-be-encouraging rejection notes I was getting were depressing me more than curt uninformative ones, because the implication was that there was some particular thing I wasn't getting and if I couldn't get it with that kind of help, I never would. And yet, I do keep writing, and some of the things I write seem pretty good to me. A lot of them, even. But it's like I'm getting better and better at writing the wrong things. So when I was in the worst of early widowhood it seemed like the best thing I could do was to embrace those wrong things and just write what I felt like and not even try to make it fit into publishable formats. Consequently, I have spent the last three years writing angsty gay romantic comedy novellas. And even though there is a booming market for almost exactly that, the market is for stories that are all those things and also erotic (and really often, and this is a dirty little secret nobody wants to talk about, they're as exploitative and objectifying and appropriating as the heterosexual stuff, but I'm not right now talking about how Lucy is better than other people, I'm talking about how Lucy avoids trying to compete in any sense). And really, my stories, even the one that goes right to a pickup in the baths, are not especially erotic. I mean, once in a while there's a bit of actual sex, but it's there because you can tell a lot about a person by describing how they go about giving or receiving a blow job. Even the one story people like the best -- "The Raw and the Cooked" -- there's one off-camera blowjob and then some vague references to last night's sex, with a joke about positions because tangent tangent tangent stereotypical sexual divisions of labor piss me off.

The point, and I do have one, is that I do believe what I read here in personhead Deborah Ross's journal, and I am deeply concerned that "naive prose" is precisely the problem I suffer from and that I lack the discernment to see where I need to change to make the work professional: but that so far I have not been able to engage with this problem in a productive way. Instead I despair, and write another bagatelle about a couple of guys blundering into a peculiar relationship with a shaky happy ending. (Currently I put the one about erectile dysfunction and the one about the triangle around the nice fellow with no self-esteem on hiatus so I could spend the last couple of months and also the next couple of months in not-Poland).

Not-Poland might be coming along pretty well, though, if I'm not deluding myself completely.

Comments

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Not sure I entirely understand what "naive prose" means in that article, but I have come to realise that there's a certain consciousness in the writing I really like, only the lines of "I've got the story, you've got the attention, let's deal."

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

Is "only" meant to be "along?" In either case, can you expand on this?

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

Yes, I meant "only along the lines of", but I was typing too quickly (internet has been playing up and I've already failed to submit this comment once.)

What I meant was the type of writing where the author is consciously imparting questions to the reader with an awareness of how long the reader will stay interested.

Instead of "how can I cram in all the information the reader needs to know without it getting boring", the question is more "how can I dole out the questions I have in a way that will keep the reader interested as long as possible?"

[papersky.livejournal.com]

The thing of yours I have read did not suffer from naive prose.

[ritaxis.livejournal.com]

There's something wrong with it, though. That one thing was hideously long, but there was more wrong with it than that, or I'd have been asked to cut it somewhere along the line.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I think my problem is niceness. After doing the creative writing courses, I know that I can write accomplished prose (though I have to really work at it), but my stories don't sell because they're just a little too ordinary and safe.

This, of course, may not be your problem at all, but after wondering whether it was even worth writing at all, I've more or less decided that it is, but I'm just going to write for me.