Juvenilia is hilarity.
22/12/11 20:45![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
owlectomyI just spent an evening reading Prayers To Broken Stone, the novel I wrote for NaNoWriMo back all the way in 2002 that really wanted to be a cracked-out Utena AU.
I have discovered:
-Somehow in the last ten years, I actually figured out how to write.
-If you just have people yelling at each other with no internal monologue or body language, you... just have people yelling at each other with very little emotional context. I think it was reading YA that finally broke me of this.
-You cannot learn to write novels from watching TV or reading manga. In prose, all you get is words to tell a story with. It's a different animal.
-You can tell I had read Ursula LeGuin's "The Language Of The Night" and was trying to keep my characters from talking like they were from Poughkeepsie. Result: hilarious diction shifts! I don't have any thees and thous, but it still definitely sounds like 1990s high-schoolers trying to pretend that they're in Medieval Times. I think I'm more comfortable now being plain and precise with my words.
-Rape: still not a great plot device!
-It is a hard trick to put the thing that you see in your head down onto the page.
-You probably should know just a tiny little bit about love before you try to write about it. And if you don't, probably don't try to just crib from the BL you've read.
-There is a reason I used to be able to tear through 2000 words in a day and now 600 is more like it.
There's still something that I really like about it, though. What it means to give up on loving the person that you absolutely can't have; what it means to begin to forgive and repair the damage to a love you long since gave up on. (The other parts that I like about it mostly show up in the book I just turned in; I guess for some mysterious reason I'm fond of Reclusive Bitter Intellectual Finds Love After All plots...)
I could probably find a decent short story buried somewhere in here...
If I ever doubt that I'm a writer, I need only remind myself that I wrote that and kept writing anyway -- and that if I put myself on vacation for two weeks it won't be long before I'm thinking of what I should write next.
I have discovered:
-Somehow in the last ten years, I actually figured out how to write.
-If you just have people yelling at each other with no internal monologue or body language, you... just have people yelling at each other with very little emotional context. I think it was reading YA that finally broke me of this.
-You cannot learn to write novels from watching TV or reading manga. In prose, all you get is words to tell a story with. It's a different animal.
-You can tell I had read Ursula LeGuin's "The Language Of The Night" and was trying to keep my characters from talking like they were from Poughkeepsie. Result: hilarious diction shifts! I don't have any thees and thous, but it still definitely sounds like 1990s high-schoolers trying to pretend that they're in Medieval Times. I think I'm more comfortable now being plain and precise with my words.
-Rape: still not a great plot device!
-It is a hard trick to put the thing that you see in your head down onto the page.
-You probably should know just a tiny little bit about love before you try to write about it. And if you don't, probably don't try to just crib from the BL you've read.
-There is a reason I used to be able to tear through 2000 words in a day and now 600 is more like it.
There's still something that I really like about it, though. What it means to give up on loving the person that you absolutely can't have; what it means to begin to forgive and repair the damage to a love you long since gave up on. (The other parts that I like about it mostly show up in the book I just turned in; I guess for some mysterious reason I'm fond of Reclusive Bitter Intellectual Finds Love After All plots...)
I could probably find a decent short story buried somewhere in here...
If I ever doubt that I'm a writer, I need only remind myself that I wrote that and kept writing anyway -- and that if I put myself on vacation for two weeks it won't be long before I'm thinking of what I should write next.
(no subject)
23/12/11 05:27 (UTC)