Resistance Again

The problem is--and since I don't have the other blog to bitch about writing on anymore, you get it here, live and unscripted--the problem is that the story I'm working on is very hard to write. As in, a toddler almost dies, and it's her mother's fault; and I've been working on this story for months, so you'd think that by now, going through that scene would be a cakewalk, but it's not. It's not. Even at this distance, where it's fake people doing fake things, it's so incredibly hard to think about being a mother who almost loses her child that I freeze up.

It's taken me this long to write it because of resistance--every time I look at it, I get "bored." "This is boring! I'm bored of it! I don't want to write this anymore!" Of course, what it really is is fear; but oh god I want this one to be over so I never have to look at it again.

An attitude that is not conducive to any confidence in my story's quality. Bah.

And here I am, looking at it again. Is it really coherent, does it really hang together, or have I just convinced myself that it does so I won't have to look at it again? But I do. My little story deserves better. It could be very good, if I could wrangle my resistance to the ground and look at it like a story instead of a portent.

The worst of it is that in order to write fiction properly (and I say this like I'm a real writer) you have to act. You have to be, while you are writing, the narrator, the main character, whatever. You have to inhabit their skin so you can report what they see, what they smell, how the ground feels under their shoes, if the light is blinding them, if it's nippy or muggy. You don't just make it up. You make up the whole world (if you write fantasy or sci fi) and then you close your eyes and put yourself there, as the character, and be them. And write about it. If you can touch type computers are convenient for this because you literally can close your eyes and be unaware of the world you are actually in.

And it's so, so, so hard to force myself to be this woman, this person who almost loses her daughter and who blames herself, over and over so I can get the story right. I have to let myself feel her fear and her anger and her grief, over and over again, so I can describe it properly--if I can't feel it, a reader won't. I probably won't get it right anyway; but I'd like to be as close as I can get, if only so I never have to look at this one again.

So here I am. It's open on the screen behind my notepad program. And I have a million reasons why I cannot read it one more time. But I will. I'm going to print it off and take my red felt pen and go upstairs and force myself for fifteen minutes to read it again and ask myself all those fun questions, like, does this dialogue sound fake? Is this something this character would say? Is the sun coming from the right direction? Do I have the ecology right? Do characters mysteriously appear and disappear? Do I keep the chairs in the same rooms throughout? Do the windows stay in the same spot? Does anyone grow or lose hair or limbs or freckles or wrinkles? Do I start it in the right place? Have I left out crucial background information? And what, exactly, is the quality of grief and terror that a mother who almost loses her child would feel? Where in the body would it be? Would it be like a ripping, a tearing, a numbing, like a fire, like ice? How badly would she want to die? Then hold it for as long as I can so I can get the words right.

It's not as much fun as it sounds.

Posted by Andrea at August 9, 2006 6:32 PM under Wordsmithery

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