A Fetid and Unruly Clunker
My first scene features an ugly speech. I don’t mean to say here that an evil character says evil things or that a righteous character has some unpleasant truths to convey. The speech is repellent because it is written so poorly. A fetid and unruly clunker of a paragraph. I have tried to be kind to myself about these first stages of this process. It’s a first draft. It will die a thousand deaths and be reincarnated a thousand times if I work hard and run into some luck.
Since I typed the diseased thing into existence a couple of days ago, I am haunted and mocked. The moment I am unoccupied with something else, it calls to me, vile and singsongy: “Giiiiiiiideonnnnnn, you su-uck at thiiiiiis.”
I had a terrifying dream just before waking this morning. Basically, I was mentally tortured in various ways. One psychological sadist after another after another. Just when I was getting used to whatever form of abuse I was enduring, I’d materialize in a different place with someone new to torment me. The chain of misery ended when I fizzed into existence in a field, alone. Then, a commercial airliner fell from the sky about a hundred yards in front of me. It did not crash. It simply fell straight down onto its belly. I managed to ask myself how many people I thought were onboard. I woke up.
I scrambled for one of the notebooks in my bedroom and dropped it on the couch on my way to my morning leak. By the time I was shaking myself dry, the damned scene was teasing me again: “You miiiight as well not botherrrrrr…” I forgot about the passenger jet for a couple of hours.
Instead of staring at the offending paragraph and getting nowhere, I decided to charge ahead with my story. I’m pleased with the new bit I wrote today. Broadly, it adhered to what I had outlined, but it surprised me with some of its specificity. I enjoyed and was satisfied by my three hours of work.
Feeling my tailbone aching, I decided to stretch out and go for a walk. Just a quick, thirty minute stroll in the breeze. You really needed this, I told myself. I felt myself walking faster. I arrived at home, sat down at the computer, and deleted dozens and dozens of words which added up to nothing but a lack of finesse. I typed out what one character meant to say to another all along, before I got in the way. I typed three words: You needed it.
PHOTO: This is my cat. The dejected look is pure emotional manipulation. He will do anything to distract me from working and once he does wants nothing to do with me.
PROGRESS REPORT: I am taking a look at what the calendar might look like in the world I am creating, so I did some research on that. I struggled to justify a couple of quick emotional turns a character makes and I think I got there. I broke down some scenes in my outline into mini-beats. I made some notes about a bit of fictional history which will set up the central relationship in the book. I stopped for the day when I found mush in my head, instead of brains. I have written 3472 words.