Well, it is. At least, the net effect is fun. But the day to day writing can be kind of…difficult.
I’ve made some progress in the last few days, even though I neglected to write about it here. Mostly, it’s just been between classes or insanely late at night, so I haven’t had time to write any blog entries. But I’ll write a quick one tonight.
In the last section that I wrote, I introduced this new character who believes that Ian is some kind of a holy figure and decides to become his disciple. The feedback I got from the writing group was that the way I introduced Master Elijah from his own POV was very good, so I decided to do basically the same thing. That is, from a limited 3rd person point of view, give a very brief summary of the character and any aspects of his life story that tie directly into what is actually going on in the action. The result is a short synopsis of the character’s life that transitions nicely into the action in the particular section, without feeling too info-dumpish.
I tried to do the same thing here, and threw in a couple of ideas about cleavages and tribal friction that we’ve been learning in my Political Systems of the Middle East class. I want to take a lot of the ideas of stuff that we’re learning in that class and apply it to this fictional society. I don’t want the culture to exactly parallel Arab culture, but to take enough aspects from it that it gets the same flavor. Besides, it’s kind of a fun testing ground for experimenting with the ideas that we’re learning in class. And it’s an excellent class, btw. I’d highly recommend it, if you’re interested at all in the modern Middle East. PLSC 357 with Dr. Bowen.
However, I was very disappointed with how this section turned out. I wrote it in about three chunks over three days, but each time that I sat down to write, I was doing it more to reach the 500 words a day goal than because I felt inspired to do it. Basically, I sat down and forced myself to write. And…it wasn’t as fun as it usually is. The words didn’t flow. I was falling asleep at the computer in the LRC. Things didn’t seem to be meshing together properly. It was WAY too info-dumpish, and I had to make up a lot of the information there on the spot, which made it even more difficult because I had to force myself to start coming up with new ideas. It hurt a bit, but I came up with a few good ones. Hopefully I can develop them more and better a little bit later.
Now, I suppose that you can’t just expect writing to be fun all of the time. It does take work, which can in some ways be unpleasant. And it’s not practical to just wait to feel inspired all of the time. At the same time, you really do have to enjoy what you do, and you can’t force inspiration. Ideas will come and hit you at times when you aren’t expecting them, and you have to be ready to take them and fit them into a framework, otherwise they just slip through your fingers.
So, I suppose that good writing is some kind of a balance between hard work and pure inspiration. And the direction my story is taking me at this time is hard work.
And I’m willing to go that way–so long as it makes sense to do that. Tonight, for example, it’s freaking late and I need to get some sleep, so I probably won’t write in my novel tonight. It just doesn’t make much sense to me to trudge through the required wordcount and come up with some barely cohesive prose and crappy story elements. It makes much more sense to me to work myself up to being excited about the next part, and then writing 1,000 words of good prose and good story tomorrow.
Of course, the balance to this is that if I keep putting off writing, the ideas that I have will die. So, I really can’t just do this all the time. Sometimes, you’ve just got to trudge through it. But…I don’t know. I just hope I can keep this story going strong until it finishes.
(btw, this dilemma is why I chose as a teenager that I would not become a professional writer. I knew enough to know that if writing became my main source of income, I wouldn’t enjoy it anymore. At the same time…I can’t just expect to reap the fruits when I didn’t nourish the seeds. So…I don’t know.)
