Wednesday, May 18, 2011

I've been working on a novel...

I've been working on a novel for a very long time. I'd probably have worked on it less if only I'd not taken giant gaps of not working on it all this time. But you see, I'm what is called an ordinary human being. I procrastinate. I find reasons not to work on it. I start a new hobby. I give myself all sorts of excuses that ultimately prevent me from working on it. Then tv shows, films and other books come out with similarities to my own story and so I think, if I'd only stuck to it! Well, no more, hopefully.
There really is a lot going on in my life. I really wish sometimes I could be like the author of Water for Elephants and just lock myself in a closet for six months to finish my book without any interruption, but closets are dark and small and usually filled with coats. Not my ideal writing space, exactly.
The problem with taking a break for so long from writing a story is you start to see the faults within the story, even if it's only in its early stages. Your characters are not complex enough. Some of your characters just don't work. A major plot device gets contradicted later on or is easy to disprove. Then other ideas for the story pop into your head that sound great, but would cause a serious rewrite.
What I'm planning to do is this: I'm going to write my story, even if it's completely bonkers. And once a week, I'm going to blog about my progress. I won't be divulging my story, but I'll write about things that come about or complications I come upon. There may be blog posts where I might say, I didn't write anything this week, but I'll try to write about interesting things that happened or why I didn't write. Hopefully, this will get my mind working to actually write my story.
I'd like to take a paragraph and explain why I didn't follow through on writing about my time as an extra. Once I started thinking back to that time, the whole thing just really depressed and angered me. There were some really fun and interesting moments, but it mostly just took a toll on me. Along with other things that were going on outside of work, I just felt I wasn't being treated with respect as a human being. I didn't really want to put myself back in that mindset, so I chose not to continue. Maybe later, but I think whenever I try to look back on the whole situation, I'll feel crappy about it.

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