Tonight I'm researching things I'd rather not have to research because I wish they didn't exist. There's a scene in Soulwoven: Exile that was very difficult to write, and that it's extremely important to me not to get wrong. So. Research. Dark Things. Frightening Things. A whole mess of unpleasantness that taps my pysche in all kinds of unsettling ways.
And it's Monday, and that's one of the days I blog now, and I don't really have anything else to talk about.
Oh! Except being rusty. Good. Let's focus on that because it's less of a bear to write about without spoiling. Also, it's a happier subject.
This morning I finished making revision notes on Soulwoven: Exile and started revising. At the end, actually. Because one of the great tricks of a good novel is the way the end wraps around to the beginning, and the end wasn't working quite right. I need to nail it down before I go back to the beginning and make sure the circle closes.
It's been a month and half since I wrote anything new, and man, am I rusty.
Returning to writing after a layoff is always a little bit terrifying. I'm never sure whether it's going to come back, or whether I'm just going to keep on sucking as much as I do for the first however-many-hours-it-takes-to-get-out-the-kinks. Inevitably, it comes back, and then I get better. Thank God.
But right now, I feel like a shadow of the writer who finished Soulwoven. And having spent most of the last month and a half staring at the pages of Soulwoven, I'm not sure how I'm ever going to achieve that level of polish again.
I will. I'm quite certain of it, because that's how this whole thing works. You just keep spitting and polishing and spitting and polishing until it shines. And the thing that is Soulwoven: Exile lying underneath the grime of I-haven't-polished-this-yet is going to be beautiful. It's better than Soulwoven. It may even be much better than Soulwoven. The final paragraph (which only became the final paragraph this morning, after I snipped off some extraneous bits) gave me shivers. I will get the rest of it to look like that too eventually.
But in the meantime, I'm scared. And that's normal. And I say that because I don't think there's anyone in my life who isn't scared about their career sometime, no matter how good they are at it. And if you're reading this, there's a reasonable chance you think I do a decent job as a writer. Maybe if I'm honest about how terrified I am of sucking sometimes you'll think of it someday when it can help you.
And that would be wonderful.
Showing posts with label humble pie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label humble pie. Show all posts
Monday, March 31, 2014
Monday, March 17, 2014
Hubris and Its Wages
I put the last of the hand-annotated copies of Soulwoven for domestic Founder's Circle backers in the mail today. Still a few more copies to go overall, but for the most part, the mad sprint around the book's launch is now over, and I've got a few thoughts to share on hubris.
One of the wonderful things about creating these hand-annotated copies was that doing so let me go over the book again and again and again, moving through it at a pretty good clip and picking out themes and relationships between scenes and characters and chapters that I hadn't put in there consciously (there were also things I did put in there consciously, and I saw those too, but they were less interesting to me because I expected them).
In several copies, I found myself making the following note, or one very much like it:
This is quite true. Quay, the prince who leads his friends out of their homes without fully understanding his own limitations, is a lesson in hubris. Len, the Aleani who's spent his life hunting a necromancer and who continues that hunt in the face of everyone important in his life telling him to abandon it, is another. Leramis gets his own brief, painful lesson partway through the book.
I got my own lesson in hubris with these hand-annotated copies. I knew I could do them. But I'd never done them before, and in light of that, I probably ought to have set my sights a little lower than 26 copies for my first go. Today was the first day in about a month that I haven't had to spend three or four hours after work making one of those copies. I laughed aloud when five o'clock rolled around and I set down my normal work for the day, because I realized I felt like I was on vacation because I didn't have any work to do tonight.
I don't want to make it sound like I didn't enjoy making these books; I did. They're works of art (their quality is up for debate, but they're art nonetheless) in and of themselves, and each one's unique. I did about as many line drawings in the last month as I have in the rest of my life combined, and some of them turned out really beautifully. There's a depiction of the gull's feather in chapter 41 in someone's book that's among the best visual art I've ever made. I got to know the story I told more intimately as well; I realized that Dil's decisions shape the narrative perhaps more than any other character's and that hers is the only full hero's journey in the book, and I absolutely love that.
But I also got a lesson in my limitations while working on a book in which several characters receive painful lessons in their limitations. There's a certain irony in that that doesn't escape me.
Writer, beware thyself.
One of the wonderful things about creating these hand-annotated copies was that doing so let me go over the book again and again and again, moving through it at a pretty good clip and picking out themes and relationships between scenes and characters and chapters that I hadn't put in there consciously (there were also things I did put in there consciously, and I saw those too, but they were less interesting to me because I expected them).
In several copies, I found myself making the following note, or one very much like it:
A lot of the stories in the book are about hubris and its consequences.
This is quite true. Quay, the prince who leads his friends out of their homes without fully understanding his own limitations, is a lesson in hubris. Len, the Aleani who's spent his life hunting a necromancer and who continues that hunt in the face of everyone important in his life telling him to abandon it, is another. Leramis gets his own brief, painful lesson partway through the book.
I got my own lesson in hubris with these hand-annotated copies. I knew I could do them. But I'd never done them before, and in light of that, I probably ought to have set my sights a little lower than 26 copies for my first go. Today was the first day in about a month that I haven't had to spend three or four hours after work making one of those copies. I laughed aloud when five o'clock rolled around and I set down my normal work for the day, because I realized I felt like I was on vacation because I didn't have any work to do tonight.
I don't want to make it sound like I didn't enjoy making these books; I did. They're works of art (their quality is up for debate, but they're art nonetheless) in and of themselves, and each one's unique. I did about as many line drawings in the last month as I have in the rest of my life combined, and some of them turned out really beautifully. There's a depiction of the gull's feather in chapter 41 in someone's book that's among the best visual art I've ever made. I got to know the story I told more intimately as well; I realized that Dil's decisions shape the narrative perhaps more than any other character's and that hers is the only full hero's journey in the book, and I absolutely love that.
But I also got a lesson in my limitations while working on a book in which several characters receive painful lessons in their limitations. There's a certain irony in that that doesn't escape me.
Writer, beware thyself.
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