Argh Ink

Sometimes the day goes wrong and you just can’t write.

Well, in a fit of exhaustion, I managed to delete tonight’s blog entry. I can’t believe it. I need a nap.

Basically what it said was:

Bob was right when he said I had to fix that plot point. I offered a compromise, he tweaked it and made it better (but NOT a tac nuke), and now I have a great ending because of it. So Bob is a hero.

Because of that, the first and fourth acts really pulled together and now make sense. The Mess in the Middle is still a mess, but I’m getting closer.

Trudy has a complete four act character arc that makes sense and will pull the whole novella together.

Nolan has a first and fourth act chartacter arc, and I’m sure there’ll be movement for him in Two and Three once I solve the Mess in the Middle.

There are two motifs for sure: Santa Baby sung by four different artists and the phrase “Maybe it fell off the sleigh.”

The settings are still a structural problem–toy store, street, cab, outside of warehouse, warehouse, outside of warehouse, home–but if I make the transitions tight, I might be able to get a kind of hero’s journey going there, or at least a Red Riding Hood thing, with Trudy trying to get her basket home past all the wolves.

And I’m generally feeling much more optimistic. Except that I just lost this whole blog entry which had much more detail. Definitely time for a nap. Or maybe some time on the treadclimber, that often jumpstarts my mental processes.

I can’t believe I lost an entire blog entry. I was using it for notes for the story, too, so it’s really bad. Must learn to hit “Save As Draft” when I wander off.

Oh, and I wrote nothing today. Not a word. So I have two days left to write 8,000 words.

Argh.

Bob pointed out earlier this evening that I am rejecting all his help on Trudy without even considering it. He’s right. I look at everything he says and think, “Background story, not Trudy’s,” without considering that what’s in the background might illuminate Trudy. And in fact, it did, although Trudy’s starting to turn into the Expostion Fairy. It’s like that scene in Gremlins where Phoebe Cates talks about how her father dressed up like Santa and got stuck in the chimney and died and that’s why she hates Christmas. Funny as hell in the movie, but not quite what I was going for here.

Maybe it’s a tone problem.

But the problem Bob and I are struggling over is one plot move that I think is essential and that he keeps pointing out, rightly, makes the rest of the story very difficult to motivate. So I’m creating my own problem here because I’m clinging to this plot point and I can’t really tell him why. Well, I can, but as he pointed out, rationally and cogently, I can accomplish the same things in other ways that won’t make my plot ridiculous.

So I should try to plot this by taking out that point and approaching it the way he suggests. Except that approach knocks the plot off, I think. It just feels wrong. And while it is true that I am stubborn as a pig (he did not put it that way), I think when I hold onto something this instinctively, it’s because it’s important. I can completely understand why my pig-stubborn insistence on that plot point while asking him for help is making him want to drive six hundred miles with a shovel (he didn’t write that, either), but I think when you know something is right, you just go with it. Even when your professional better half e-mails you and says, “YOU’RE WRONG.” (He did write that.)

But then, of course, you solve your own problems since you’ve driven your writing partner to ALL CAPS in his frustration with you. And then pray he’ll forgive you when you come back later and say, “Could you look at this action stuff to see how lame it is because I really am bad at this and you’re great at it.” Fortunately, he’s a very patient and forgiving soul. So I have my hopes.

You know, it’s always hard, but every time it seems worse.

Okay, this plan-by-scene thing is not working. Evidently I don’t write in scenes.

I do, however, seem to write in acts. That’s the good news. Oh, and I’m at 10,000 words. In theory, halfway done with the rough draft.

The bad news is that there appear to be only three acts. And I’m pretty sure I need four. The first act set itself up nicely. The fourth act seems to know where it’s going. But as usual, it’s the mess in the middle that’s going to get me. Probably because I had this entire novella planned to take place from six PM to six AM. Not a lot of time to develop character in there let alone a romance.

So I’ve dragged out my trusty white board, scoured all the Don’t Look Down notes off it, and started diagramming Trudy. I know the turning points, but that does me no good if I don’t know the people. The key is to make Trudy determined and unyielding without making her dumb as a rock for not just giving up the toy when all these dangerous men are trying to take it from her. I have to make the reader say, “Hell, I wouldn’t give it up, either.” Which goes back to motivation. If they love Trudy and they believe that she believes she has to get that toy, they’ll take the ride with her. Otherwise, she’s a TDTL heroine: To Dumb To Live.

Write this down: Character is the soul of fiction. Yes, I know that’s obvious. But it appears to be a lesson I learn all over again every time I write.

So I’m at 8500 words, and I’m wondering: Do first drafts always suck?

I don’t remember my early stuff being this bad, but then all I remember from early stuff is the final drafts. And once again, I’m writing 95% dialogue, which I was hoping writing with Bob had broken me of. Radio plays, I should write radio plays.

I like these characters, I just don’t believe them. They’re perfectly nice people, except for the bad guys who do have motivation for being Bad, but I don’t believe they’re real, I’m not worried about them, there’s no blood in their veins, no juice in their scenes. I feel like I’m typing instead of writing.

So tomorrow, I’m definitely putting in time on the collage. I used to just paste pictures and put things from the books around the computer, but people like Jo Beverley and Barbara Samuel and Susan Wiggs kept swearing by collage, gluing the pictures down together, so I thought, “What the hell?” and I tried it. Amazing process, which I immediately lost my grip on, of course, and did these elaborate things, but they work, so I’m good with it. The idea isn’t to illustrate the story, it’s to glue together pictures and objects and words that create the mood of the story so that you can look at it and be sucked back in to that place and time. People usually scoff in the beginning, but then they try it and they’re hooked on it. Well, female writer people. Male writers tend to resist it with every fiber of their beings. At least the male writer I know. But I digress.

So I had this old shadow box that I’d saved for a future collage, and while I was daydreaming this book, I thought of it, and it fit that old toy store the story opens in. So I took the glass out of it and chipped out all the ugly crap the store had glued in and started collecting the Stuff. In this case, the Stuff was pictures from an Anthropologie catalog because their models always look so annoyed (conflict), and a bunch of Christmas stuff including a cherub with a violin, and a toy policeman from Goodwill. There was one sulky model slumped on a couch that looked like Trudy’s sister, except her hair was too big, so I cut some of it off and put that in the background of the box. And there was one model who looked mad as all hell, but she was too skinny so I glued some patterned paper on her for a wider skirt and colored her jacket with markers to thicken her waist. And I tried to fix her face with markers, too, but she’s still too damn skinny. I blame Kate Moss. So I’m looking for a new head for her, and in the meantime, I’ve cracked the wings off the cherub and painted it to look like a little boy in jeans and a red T-shirt for Trudy’s nephew Leroy, and I painted the policeman toy in camoflage so that it looks like the insane war toy doll, Major MacGuffin, right down to the artificial raspberry I painted Army green to look like a grenade.

Yes, I am insane, what’s your point?

My point is that if I can get these visuals in here, I can start to get a grasp on the book. And then as I glue things down, relationships become apparant, and motifs, and the story starts to organize itself. I’ve done them before (if you want to see them, they’re on the website under “Fan Trivia”) and they always help. And this one is so early yet, it’s missing so much stuff, that I’m thinking maybe tomorrow, I’ll work on that before I try to write more.

But I did get my 2000 words done today. 8500. They’re not good words, but they’re words.

Argh.