Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Same as last time

At some point we're going to discuss Fear of Success.

One clue: how long will it take me to post something about Fear of Success and does posting it mean willingness to confront the issue or an interest in not actually writing my work?

Thursday, December 17, 2009

22. Thereabouts.

I'm just starting to see the outlines of the whole piece's form. It's not so much that I've hiked up a mountaintop. More like I've heaped jigsaw puzzle pieces into different stacks and I've started to figure out that a certain percentage of this thing is going to look like seashore and a certain percentage an egret. Or turkey. No, no, egret.

I am feeling blindly, but every day I have a few lines that seem apt, and I write them down, and I just yesterday got to the place where one set of lines met another, two railway tracks heading in the same direction.

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

18, more or less

Working outside of my comfort zone.

I have a basic structure in mind for this -- it's something relatively short and I think I know most of the actions that have to happen. But each individual scene doesn't have a shape yet. Generally I need an ending before I can get comfortable with the rhythm and the depth of detail and the places to deviate. If I know the end it's easier to know when I'm driving toward it and when I'm faking left.

Accepting now that I don't know any of that now, today I just started writing what I do know. In the middle of maybe six scenes. It's a little like doing a jigsaw puzzle and taking the pieces that are definitely people and definitely faces, and leaving the blue sky for later.