The Word Up (my writing journal part 3)
- Vera
- Mar 16, 2020
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 28, 2020
How I crossed the psychological barrier of 70 000 words for the same story.
There should not be anything psychological with the 70000 words to start with, but for some unexplainable reason, I have been sabotaging myself wildly in the past week, deleting a paragraph here and there for time that seemed like forever. The good part in the whole let's call it creative process, was that at least I had the word counter off-display so I had to actually make an effort to find out how many of them there are, which like every effort required when it doesn’t involve chocolate, proved to do the job for me and once a few days I happened to find out that The words are 65000, afterwards 69500 and then the deleting mechanism in me turned automatically on and I was back on 67 000. And so on so forth.
Counting words to justify progress is the stupidest thing I can imagine, by the way. So, let’s get down to business. To see if I am like the programmer who finds the bug in their code, while telling someone what they did. For this reason, they nurse a gummy duckling on their working desk. Someone to talk to. Not a word about listening.
My story has one blank spot with the size of a truck and another one with the size of a f*ck. On top of that, there is an incomplete sub-story that starts 20 pages before the end and presumably nobody cares about it and/or everyone is tired of all that suspense (tied loosely around the eternal question ‘Who is the kisser?’).
A surprising fact about the novel (let's call it novel, now that it has volume enough) is that however many times I try to write a synopsis, I completely and utterly fail midway. I have no clue how it happens but what comes out of the synopsis writing is only loose ends that meet together and when I see it, I start writing my way to tying them, having completely lost interest in the synopsis. I find it hard to know in advance what happens in my story… Sad but true.
So, I have a story with a beginning, plot development, whirls and curls here and there, a plot gap (or two), a few homeless scenes and a credible calm ending with my signature ‘no climax’. I am not sure how I manage to miss this crucial bit every single time, but let’s imagine it never happens, because I fail to write a proper synopsis or a lean storyline where all the standard phases shine brightly through the skeleton of the plot. Here it is sensible to note that recently I read a story with no development – a beginning, inciting incident, a bunch of scenes with the same characters and a bright shining powerful climax. Therefore, in brutal honesty, I conclude that I do not feel attached to stereotypes that don’t serve my purposes. Full stop.
What I find hard is giving an alternative to my protagonists in a credible way. I have doomed them to only think of each other and this is unnatural as hell. They need other less or more obvious options for happiness, in order to have a choice and make it the way emotion dictates it. Otherwise it is too stiff. That’s what I miss in my story – the field of opportunities and the taking of decisions with proper reasoning and consequences.
Thanks, rubber duckling :)
And let's not forget to be grateful and cite my sources for the clusters of words in this entry, being borrowed from songs (in order of appearance):
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