Writing in the Wrong Direction
I have been doing a great deal of writing the past two weeks, but I feel like the more I write, the farther afield I go. I've become too comfortable with the characters and instead of their actions moving them forward with determination, they now stroll leisurely through a pastoral world. Every new scene I write seems to pull them farther away from the super-highway of inevitablity that I thought I had paved. How does a writer keep up the pressure on the cast of characters to keep them moving along at a decent clip? Do we just get tired of the struggle of writing so many conflict/resolution scenes that at some point we feel obligated to let our characters take a vacation?
Amy
Amy
posted by Seven Authors in A Private Conversation at 8:51 AM
1 Comments:
Hmm, interesting dilemma. Somehow, I think it comes to the writer. She's gotten comfortable, maybe comforted by writing. Maybe she needs a rest. A good story requires tension and the writer maybe not be up for tension right now. Make sense?
Then again, I guess we have to write in excess until we find our way back to the tension. Having just deleted 200 pages of decent to good writing and now being told I still need to get rid of some -- !!! -- we write a lot of good stuff until we write the stuff we're going to keep. We are NOT writing Moby Dick in which Hermann spends pages giving examples of how the color white symbolizes terror in many cultures, thereby justifying to the reader that it is terrifying that Moby Dick is white. Our readers won't put up with that. I'm kind of envious of Hermann. Reva
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