Monday, January 30, 2006

I have had wine

This post may be verrrrry interesting, as I will shortly pause this entry to go and fetch my third glass of wine.  Jacob's Creek Shiraz, for the detail oriented.  It is cheap, red, and yummy.

Also, I just corrected "third glass of wine" from "third glass of line" from that first sentence, so be ready to forgive type-os.

Uh-oh, apology in advance.  Upon going to bed, my husband asked, accusingly, if I had drank all the wine.  It was not true then, but it is now.  Mea culpa, Dan.  Tomorrow is payday, and I'll buy you another.

But anyway, to the post. 

So, I'm at my favorite part of the writing process, interestingly enough: I don't have a name for this, but it's a recurring stage, so it deserves one.  Probably edge-of-the-cliff stage.  I've spent the entire day wrestling with scene one of the governess story, and we've come to the edge of the cliff moment.  I will soon leap into a pit of despair and insanity, or I will find the answer.

Actually, that's not true and more's the pity.  I'm an enneagram four, so I love drama.  Anne of Green Gables and that wanting to be Lady of Shallot?  Yeah.  Except real life is never sufficiently dramatic.  You set yourself up for a nice "I'll find the answer or go crazy!" and wait to either die in a blaze of glory or ascend into nirvanna, and what happens is you're just soggy from too much wine and the damn scene is still a mess.  There is no justice.  And not nearly enough drama.

But hope is springing eternal that I"m about to Figure It Out.  My desktop toolbar or whatever that is which runs along the bottom of my screen has three governess documents, iTunes looped to Lamb's "Stronger (and that's really important), Firefox with two tabs, and then a dangerously untitled "document four" which has the keys to scene one.  A beat by beat slightly snarky breakdown of what the hell that scene, ideally, should be.

I don't have a good scene metaphor, but it's something along the lines of I have this INSANE MESS of crap that I keep piling into "Governess DLDD3" which consists mainly of three not at all connected conflicts, none of which I can bear to cut.  So I have killed myself all day at the laptop trying to find the magic lasso to yoke them.  I don't know if it's the wine or what, but I think I may have done it. Because if you live in my brain and have three unconnected conflicts, what you chiefly need is a FOURTH conflict to lay over the top as an external conflict that touches all three underling plots and makes them one.  If you read that and said, "Huh?"  you may need some wine.  Three glasses of Jacob's Creek Shiraz.  $8.99 a bottle.

Or maybe it's the song.  I don't know why, but if I listen to the same music over and over again while I try to write a scene, I figure stuff out.  This has been true my whole life. In college I listened to a tape of "Mozart Early Symphonies" while I studied Major British Authors II, and to this day if you play those songs quotes from the 17th, 18th, and 19th century British writers float thorugh my head.  All I know is right now I'm listening to "Stronger" on loop and I can just see Our Heroine pressed up against the wall, nowhere to go, no one to help her, not even believing in herself at this point, but way down deep in her core this song is playing (or some Regency equivalent) and that's why I found my throughline for the scene.

Or it could be the wine.

At any rate, I'm going to ride my alcohol-soaked happy bubble until I can't type straight, try to make that scene fly, and then go to bed.  And then probably read this entry and that scene tomorrow (with a headache) and cringe, but for TONIGHT, by God, it's going to be brilliant.  Either that or I'm sufficiently drunk that I can have a right proper despair.  We'll save the depressingly dull reality for tomorrow.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home