Forest vs. trees

I had a fun St. Patrick's Day, and woke up not with a hangover, but a fever and a sore throat. Life goes on.

It's been something of an odd transition, working near full-time freelance hours. I've had some realizations that were interesting (to me, anyway).

The first of those is that freelance proofreading, if I can fit it around writing, might be a good thing to keep a hand in even while writing "full-time." It keeps one broadly- (as opposed to merely well-) read, and exposes one to the thoughts of people one would not otherwise meet. A writer needs to maintain human contact, and at least a semblance of varied activity, or else his (or her) stories will inexorably gravitate toward the anti-story: the protagonist, an old writer, living alone, runs out of ideas. (We might perhaps call this genre "anti-fiction," as, while it is not true, it is also paradoxically devoid of imagination or embellishment of reality.)*

Trying to work a real full day on my laptop, I finally got sick of screens. Because my work right now has to be done on my computer, if I want a respite it means doing my creative writing by hand.

Writing longhand is such a different experience. It's easy to forget this, but the writing process actually changes. At least for me. I can't write as fast as I can think. I can't type as fast as I can think either, but I think in fits and starts. When I type the pauses in my thinking are periods of silence and a stationary, blinking cursor. Writing by hand I can do my thinking while I wait for my hand to catch up with my head. There's time to revise while the hand is moving; draft 1.0 is really draft 1.5.

The extra time allows for sprawling, luxuriant sentences of the sort that were more common when everyone wrote like this. Heck, if I had to stop to sharpen my quill after every line, maybe I could make everything rhyme. To a certain extent, the extra time has to be spent embellishing the sentence at hand. You can't just buffer in a chapter of prose over an hour of diligent longhand.

Another thing happened with which I am pleased. I had come to a snag in Nenle (this is not what I was pleased with--the snag, I mean) and decided it might be worthwhile to summarize the whole story in one sitting in longhand. The point of this being that if I would need to keep to the essentials to fit it into one sitting, and if I got bored while writing any part of the summary it would stand to reason that that part would be even more boring fleshed out.

This proved very helpful. I had been getting bogged down, not really able to see more than a scene ahead or behind, wherever I was. The story was meandering and I was beginning to wonder if all of it had a point. This time I was able to answer all the "what happens nexts" while I still remembered what happened at the beginning, and the story that emerged turned coherent again.

I did this with Hengist a while back too, plotting out some emotional arcs that I thought had been lost in the noise of individual scenes. It strikes me as somewhat ironic that I can't do this until I've generated a lot of noise. If I just set out to concisely trace a story arc, I doubt it would be more than occasionally interesting. The story has to emerge from the noise, grow wild (hey, new metaphor), and then be tamed again (and another. Congratulations, you've mixed a metaphor from mineral, vegetable, and animal components--go to bed, Cory).

Good has come of it. I should probably make a point of doing it in the process of everything I write. It is so easy to get lost, or to labor over a sentence through a jeweler's loupe, putting the perfect polish on an idea that's just wrong.

* Yes, that is harsh to the point of pretentiousness. I should talk. Just because my ratio of artistic integrity to published work is a value of infinity doesn't mean the numerator is nontrivial.