SquarePeg Books

What I like most

about writing with the muse whispering seductively in my ear is that I kinda know where things are going. I’ve got a beginning, there’s some stuff in the middle and I know how things are going to end in a rough fashion.

Of course things change as I write while suffering under muse-fever, but they aren’t changes that require a huge amount of thought.  They happen. My creative mind is in tune with my logical mind – they talk to each other, make suggestions, work collaboratively.

It’s an exhausting ride with the muse because by the end of six weeks, I’ll have a rough draft completed and at least 1 or 2 more started and my brain is half melted, but it’s satisfying.

This is not one of those times. This is me slaving over every scene – does this make logical sense here? Can I weasel out of this scene? Fuck. A logical series of one event leading to the next completely destroys the middle and ending I had planned. Now what?

I tell myself to keep writing. I can do this. Even If I’m not writing, I can plan the next few scenes, I can loosely plot out what goes where, so that things make sense, even if I ultimately decide I nee to just hand wave a bit instead of writing out the whole bloody interaction.

The problem right now is that I seem to have lost my middle.  I mean, I’m actually working on the beginning of the middle, I have plans for what is going to happen in the middle, but as things have progressed, the middle has made it very clear that the middle and end are not going to be entirely what I want it to be.  Oh, sure – I can still kill off the characters I’d planned on killing and realign the world to reflect the new reality that is the result of all this finagling, but it is definitely not going to end the way I’d initially planned.

It’s upsetting when I run across a section like that. It takes me a while to grok that I’m in a section like that, that I’ve veered off the map entirely. Maybe the initial map wasn’t as accurate as the gas station attendant advertised, or maybe I just took a left at the wrong time but the view was spectacular – either way, I’m only still on the map in the loosest meaning of terms.

The map is about a section of Colorado, and I’m in the state of Colorado, just not the part of the state that the map reflects.

Once I understand that, once I’ve accepted that little nugget of “DUH!,” a process that can take a few days or weeks (it’s kinda like a grieving process – denial, irritation, more denial, irritated depression, vague acceptance), the brain starts trying to piece out where I can go to get out of where I am.

I know I’ve hit acceptance when the irritation of  “why won’t this fit!?!?!” leaves and I hit a calm point, psychologically.

The calm could be a pleasant canoe paddle across a pond or the eye of a hurricane. It’s hard to tell when I’m there.

But it usually generates something a bit more interesting and satisfying than anything that was on the map in the first place.

Eventually.