A Small Epiphany, But I'll Take It!

I need to know how to like my own writing again.

I mean, I do like my own writing. I read stuff I've written and I enjoy it. In all honesty, sometimes I forget I even wrote it and just get lost in the story. I'm not looking at it in terms of "this sentence structure is good" and "this dialogue didn't really work the way I thought it would." I'm just ... reading it. Like I would be reading a book I bought at the store.

And then I wonder why I can't do that again. If I could do it three or four or five or whatever years ago, I should be able to do it now.

And yet I can't.

I know that it's me. I'm gripping, and I know that I'm gripping. I totally recognize that what I'm writing doesn't really suck and that I don't really need to just delete everything and start over. As a matter of fact, I was reading over one of the rewrite projects I started and subsequently abandonded because it sucked out loud omg, and it really isn't that bad. I just ... don't like it.

I'm not happy with it. Any of it. Not just The Witch of November, but anything. I start something and I stop. That fanfic I posted a couple weeks ago? That was a rewrite of a rewrite of a rewrite. It took me something like three weeks to get it to where I wanted it, and I'm used to being able to whip short little one-shots like that out in a matter of days.

It is inordinately frustrating.

That all being said, however, I think I came up with a small epiphany for my prologue. I was having trouble hitting the correct emotional notes, partly because I felt it was too heavy to start out the book. Maybe "heavy" isn't the correct word, but the prologue was reading as more depressing than I really wanted it to.

So I came up with the idea of having Lillian totally into the idea of the seance instead of choosing to do one because it was a last resort. That way, the prologue reads are more anticipatory than desperate, which I think will help with the tone issue I was having.

At least, I hope so.

So, y'know, cross your fingers for me.

Oh, and one more quick thing: I've mentioned using the Social Security Administration website to get an idea on popular names in various time periods. I've also found a website that will tell you what day of the week any given date was.

(This all came about because I wanted Millie and Lillian's seance to be held on a Friday in August of 1877. I freely admit that I'm a dork.)

Kicking Writer's Block In The Pants

Okay, you remember how I wrote in all my previous posts about various fanfic projects? (It's okay if you don't, because I totally fail at updating this thing.) Yeah, pretend I didn't write those posts, because I never finished the fics.

I'm not entirely sure why. It could be because I'm up to my arse in Writer's Block Argh-ness. (Yes, I just made that up. Stop looking at me like that.) It could be because my fandom tastes have changed. It's very hard to go back and write fic for a fandom you haven't written for in quite literally years.

But this post is not meant to be about fanfic and certainly not about fanfic projects that never got off the ground. This post is about how I maybe possibly am kicking my writer's black in the pants.

I'm not willing to call it conquered yet. But I am willing to let it know that I am finally ready to fight back with all I have.

A huge part of my issue with the beginning couple chapters of The Witch of November is that I just don't like it. How can I expect anyone else to like it when I don't like it?

How did I get to a point where I don't even like my own writing? I don't really know. But I think a large part of it was because I was trying to write it with the judgments of any potential readers who aren't me. Essentially, I was trying to write for some imaginary panel of judges rather than for myself.

The only problem is you have to write for yourself. It just comes out better that way. I have to tell the story in the way that I want to rather than the way I think someone else might want to read it.

So you know what? Screw the imaginary readers. The only reader who matters (at least right now) is me. The more I write for me, the more I'll like what I've written. And maybe then we can get the confidence level back up enough to edit properly instead of deleting things over and over because I think they suck.

Want a snippet? This is what ten minutes with headphones and writing for oneself can do:

If anyone had told Lillian Blackstone a year ago that she’d be standing in her own parlor with an old card table acting as a makeshift altar while Mildred Albertson arranged candles on top, she would have laughed in that person’s face.

She’d been so young then, so naïve. So unaware that her comfortable, blissful life could be taken away in an instant. So unconcerned about the cruel ocean and what it could take from her. Her entire twenty-three years had been spent in a fishing town, but she’d believed that she and Josiah would beat the odds. Their marriage would last forever, immune to the ravages of winter storms and rough seas.

She’d been so stupid.

Life as she knew it ended on November 23, 1876, the night that a sudden storm had claimed the love of her life. After just barely eight months of marriage, Lillian was a twenty-three-year-old widow. For the past three months she’d done nothing but cry for the life she’d never share with her husband.

The day Mildred Albertson stopped by to offer condolences was the day that Lillian’s life had taken another turn. It was Millie who told her that death didn’t mean the end. It was Millie who offered her hope.


See? Much better. We'll just see if I like it this much tomorrow, ha.

You Guys!

I've written! More than one page! And I don't actively hate it!

It's fanfic (SVU, to be precise) and I'm not sure it's really going anywhere, but I'm hoping it'll be a cute little fluffy oneshot when I'm done with it. When I first wrote a story entitled "A Day With the Cole Brothers" I originally intended to make it the first in a small series of stories with Casey, Olivia, and the two Novak nieces (whom I completely made up). I wrote one more and then promptly ran out of ideas.

It wasn't that I didn't have any ideas. It was that all my ideas were very similar to stories I'd already written. Which was lame and so I didn't write them. Well, while I was sitting there at work this week, not really thinking about much of anything unrelated to work, I got a little idea for a new oneshot for the series.

It's really dry so far, but 1) it's not done, and 2) it's the first draft. My first drafts  are always really dry. But I'm cautiously optimistic about this one. I'm actually looking forward to working on it and getting back into the groove again.

And who knows? Maybe I'll post the finished product here!

Writer's Block Is Evil But Not Unconquerable

So. Writer's block. It's a real thing, a real aggravating, maddening thing, and I've written about it a lot. Because it's real and aggravating and maddening, and when you're in the middle of it, writing about it is pretty much the only thing you can do. If you can even get it out. Yes, my friends, it is indeed possible to have writer's block when writing a blog post about writer's block.

Welcome to my life for the last few months.

But lately I've found myself thinking about writing. And not the "I really should be writing"-guilty thoughts, but the "I want to set aside time and write today"-proactive thoughts. And today, I set aside some time and I wrote.

Since the first part of The Witch of November is so messed up, I decided that I'm just going to start over. Not completely, mind you; just until the point where I haven't messed with it a whole bunch of times. You can read what I came up with if you click the jump.

(Disclaimer: the following was written in about 45 minutes and has not been edited. Tomorrow morning, it will be less tempting to gag at it and just delete the whole thing. Breaking out of writer's block requires baby steps, people.)

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My Name Is Danielle, and I Have Writer's Block

It's high time that I admit it: I have writer's block.

Like, for real and for serious. This isn't the "Oh, pooh, I'm bored with this story" kind of writer's block. This is the actual "Everything I write sucks and is so stupid omg I hate it all" kind of writer's block.

It's the kind of writer's block where you spend all day struggling to squeeze out a page and a half (web-formatted) and then the next morning delete everything you wrote because it sucks out loud. Which, as you can imagine, is more than a little frustrating.

Okay, it's a lot frustrating. It's tear-your-hair-out, gnashing-of-teeth, rending-of-garments frustrating.

Nothing comes out the way I want and even my tried and true method of the Rewrite Project hasn't managed to help. (I tried, honest, I did! But I got three pages into it and stopped ... because it sucked. See above re: "it's so stupid and I hate it all.")

So where do I go from here? Clearly, just throwing in the towel is not an option. But neither is sitting here writing and deleting and writing and deleting until the end of time. The last time I had a block like this, I broke through it by trying fic for a new fandom. Unfortunately, that is not an option this time, as none of my new shows have fic potential. (I typically need to be overly obsessed with a show in order to attempt fic for it, and I'm not at the omgsquee-supergeek point with any of the newer shows I've been watching.)

I do have a last-ditch effort up my sleeve, though: a vague idea for a new pre-series Supernatural fanfic. Y'see, at the beginning of last month, I attended a fan convention (I wasn't kidding when I said that I'm a nerd) and have since been mainlining the show. Since I've pretty much been eating, sleeping, and breathing Supernatural, the wheels in my head have been turning.

The basic idea (which is pretty much all I've come up with so far) is this: John is on a hunt in some fictional Massachusetts town, and the middle school that Sam starts at is haunted. The boys--Sam, especially--are fairly new at the hunting thing, but Dean recognizes the signs and tries getting a hold of John, but he can't. So he and Sam have to deal with it on their own (with help from Bobby via phone calls, of course.)

Yeah, the reason John's incommunicado is because John is ridiculously hard for me. But so is writing in general right now, so, y'know. Sue me.

Anyway, my plan is to try to start this at some point this weekend. Here's hoping that this 1) works out at all, and 2) gets my creative juices flowing again!

Writer's Block ... Of a Sort

I think it's time to admit that I have writer's block.

Well, sort of. I've mentioned before that I've only had one real case of writer's block where I just could not write a single thing, and that the block lasted close to two years. I'm not at that point right now. Where I am right now is a kind of burnout.

I've written and rewritten and reworded my first chapter so many times that I've honestly lost count. Nothing's coming out the way I want. It's not bad, per se, just ... not what I want.

I can't keep writing it over and over to make it come out the way I want. Especially since I don't exactly know what it is that I want. I just know that what I have now isn't it.

What do I usually do in cases like this is work on something else. Something new, maybe, just to spend time on something different in an effort to get the creative juices flowing again. I don't have any new plot ideas at the moment, so I'm embarking on a rewrite project.

Here's hoping that by the time I'm done with the rewrite, things will flow better in my main project.