That I'm in a bit of a stick here lately and I'm in the process of trying to get myself "un-stuck".
Part of my being so has to do with a few things. Firstly, that I struggle with wanting to give all my characters happy endings and yet there's a deeper part of me that wants to treat my characters with indifference, as the universe does with you and I - responding only to what they do, not to who they are, and then dealing out the appropriate consequences to those actions whether pleasurable or painful. I want to write fantasy, but I want to do so in a realistic spirit, if that makes sense.
The conversation below, excerpted from the "Rationalist Trying to Write Fantasy" thread describes it well.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
SPMiller
But I'm not willing to contribute to the perpetuation of false belief, even if it does make people feel better.
My response was: This resonates very strongly with me as well, along with Ruv Draba's comment about feeling cheated as a reader if you are lied to, and I think what bugs me most is when I feel I'm being lied to about life in general. There
is no Happy Ever After out there. There just isn't. And to be told that there is, over and over and over, tends to be... oh, what's the word? ...
detrimental to my psyche. Because inevitably, you have to pull your nose out of that book. Inevitably, you have to return to the real world where good deeds are oft unrewarded and wrongs go unpunished, where good men die while evil men prosper, and it hurts. It hurts to know that life will never be what it is in the fairy tales.
I think this is why some of my favorite books are also what many people would call depressing -
The Road,
1984, or any one of the many books I have read regarding the Holocaust - but I like them because they don't lie. They tell it like it is, and I love them for their honesty. [
end snippet]
So I'm wanting to write true-to-life, if you will, and whether that is the source of my block or it's just my own life getting in the way, I'm in the process of trying to work out the kinks via the following (and this is a snippet from my reply to a post in Outwitting Writer's Block).
[What I've taken to doing lately is to just work on some fundamentals and my problem areas are, without a doubt, lack of tension and poor character motivation. Oh, and that I'm too easy on my characters.
So, what I'm doing is
- Nixing any and all first-person perspectives and writing strictly in third, to give me some emotional distance from the characters because then it isn't me that these things are happening to, it's them, so maybe I can be a little crueler to them, lol.
- Actively looking for points in the narrative that I can ratchet up the tension - I have a tendency to let my characters reveal too much, too soon, or to smooth things over when the environment is just rich with opportunity for conflict.
- Testing my characters to see what they really and truly want for themselves, which pretty much means that they've lied to me in the past about what they want (or else they genuinely did not know) so now I do not take their word for it. If you say you are honest and loyal, you will be quizzed on it.* So that ties into motivation, I suppose.
Anyway, I am hoping that looking at this as practice (using those fave characters of mine, btw) instead of the potential impetus of my career will help unblock me. Plus, I'll not have to deal with the worst part of a block - feeling like I'm getting nothing done - because I am, in point of fact, working on problems that have plagued my writing.
*This is also something I struggle with - the so-called, "Chase your character up a tree and then throw rocks at him/her" because it feels so inorganic, so
forced.]
There are some bits out of that last clip that I took out, but you get the idea, I think. Just trying to muddle my way through this block and also work on strengthening my weaknesses. The "up a tree" bit is especially frustrating when my first novel or so was like a movie in my head that I simply wrote down, and now it feels I'm having to pull stuff out of my behind and just see what sticks.