Month: September 2017

Writing Update

Autumn's whisper.

It’s 5:30am and I’ve been up since 9am yesterday. I can’t sleep. I want to say it’s because the story is burning inside me and I have to get the words out before I burst. But I rather think it’s because of my FM and the strange weather we’ve been experiencing.

Friday was the first day of fall and the weather is anything but autumnal. It was 90°F  yesterday (or 32°C). The average temperature for this date is 68°F/20°C. And it’s humid. And storms have been brewing for the last few days, mucking up the barometric pressure and making me feel like an alien in my own body.

I shouldn’t be surprised that I have insomnia.

So I do what I usually do and try to fall asleep, and when that doesn’t work I try to make the best of things. I caught up on Outlander. Finished knitting some fingerless gloves. Planned meals for the week. Updated my task lists. Shopped for a Happy Planner (thanks for your enthusiasm around your planner, Erica). Laid on the floor to comfort Velcro Dog as he freaked out during a brief thunder-storm. And still awake at 3:30am I decided maybe I should write.\

My FM has been in flare mode for about a week and a half, and the revisions I’m making on my novella are still in my head instead of on the page. Which puts me behind my personal schedule by a week. I hate being behind. It makes me itchy.

I’ve spent the last ninety minutes working on a new scene, one that I hope ramps up the tension and gets the antagonist onto the page. I know, I know, how can I have a story without an antagonist? I thought I did, but it was the wrong person. Or people as the case may be. I needed deeper motivation for some of the decisions that my heroine makes. Something the hero can relate to on a visceral level.

So I’m adding scenes for the antagonist to become a three-dimensional character who creates obstacles.  for my heroine. She’s gifted at creating her own obstacles, which is a little bit of myself bleeding onto the page. But for a story to work and work well, there needs to be something external as well as internal creating the chaos and dissonance that leads to growth and change.

Ninety minutes later I’m still working on that damn scene. I have three different versions of it. Something’s not working. I may just pick a version and when it’s time to send this to an editor, wait for feedback. Sometimes I know something’s not working even if I’m not sure why. The joy of being an intuitive writer.

Now it’s almost 6am and I need to at least pretend to sleep. And hope my subconscious will work out this scene so I can write it and move forward with my revisions. I really want to finish them this week. Fingers crossed I can meet that deadline!

 

Photo by Silvia Viñuales via Flickr (CC BY-ND 2.0)

 

Done vs. Perfect

I have this stickyDone better than perfect note by my computer to remind me to not give into my perfectionism.

If I let Perfectionism out to play, she will hijack what I’m doing and insist on endless changes to get the project just right. Which doesn’t seem to be all that bad, right? Everything can be a little bit better than it is.

This is just what Perfectionism wants us to believe. That her endless tinkering has value. Is needed. Necessary. If we give into her, she will gleefully attack our work until it has become a mere shadow of what we actually wanted it to be.

Writing is Perfectionism’s  favorite place to add her special brand of torture to my life, but we are by no means limited to writing. Perfectionism loves to get her tentacles into how I manage our finances, how I clean a room, organize my home office, even how I structure the folder system on my computer. Perfectionism would be in every corner of my life if I let her.

(And typing that I have this picture of Perfectionism standing at the edge of the bed while my husband and I have sex, brutally critiquing my technique. I may need to bleach my brain now, thanks, Perfectionism. Thank you soooooo much.)

How do we reign in Perfectionism? We focus on done. Completing the task. Remembering that often good is good enough. Do I want my novella to be perfect? Sure. Am I going to be okay with something that is good instead of perfect? I hope so. So many books I read aren’t necessary perfect and it’s in their imperfections that story is able to flourish. Which is really what I want – my story to flourish. And it won’t flourish if I’m never able to finish it.

So done is better than perfection. Done is real. It’s solid. Perfection is a potential state of being, and I’m fairly certain I don’t want to live there.