It’s one of those nights when my hubby went to bed early. Whenever I am up at night by myself, I end up like this. Depressed almost. I suppose it’s really more pensive than anything.
I’m trying to think what I should be writing about. Surely, there is something that I have to say, but I guess I’m not feeling profound right now. And I wish I were, I feel like I should be feeling profound because. I don’t know. I’m wanting to embrace my writer-ness. I’ve been writing a book for five years and last week I sat back and realized that I was done. The story was complete. It was all filled in, a solid line from A to Z. So hubby helped me figure out what to do next and I started researching literary agents and I started reading agent blogs and author blogs and anything I could find about writing and submitting your work and I realized: I’m not done. I’m not even close. Don’t get me wrong, I’m thrilled to be at the point where I have an entire story. But most of the agents will request the first pages or chapter if your query is good enough (which is a long shot in the first place). And I realized how unsatisfied I am with the beginning of my book. It’s not good enough. I know that. I know that there are large chunks throughout the beginning of the book that just aren’t that great. I’ve been avoiding them, convincing myself that they’re good enough cause it gets me form C to D and then from G to H. But that’s not good enough. If I’m going to take the time to research and submit to all of these agents, if I’m serious about getting this thing published – which I am – then why in the world would I leave parts in it that I’m not satisfied with? I’m not; I’m going to fix them. But I’m a little scared to get started because I’m afraid that if I rework the beginning, the story will try to take me somewhere that doesn’t fit in with the rest of it.
But really that’s not it. I know I can steer it where it needs to go. Really, I know what my biggest problem is. The problem is that I don’t have a good enough setting. I don’t know exactly how and why my city is set up the way it is. And so then my characters end up drifting from place to place and there’s no cohesion in the setting. I don’t know what it looks like. How the crap did I get to the end of the book when I had a modpodge setting that didn’t flow together and didn’t really make sense? I need to sit down and draw it out, or something. The problem is that I suck at visualizing a setting. I can feel the emotions of my characters, I can hear their voices and see their expressions, but it is very difficult for me to see the space around them. Why? Because I don’t care about the space around them. I do once in a while, but for a lot of the scenes, the scenery just doesn’t matter to me. I care what goes on between my characters, I can see what happens between them, but the place where they’re standing just isn’t there. I have to make it up and so much of my setting description is just crap that I threw out there because I had to describe where they were, but I don’t see it. I wish I had the video we took when I was driving across france with my Dad and sister. Maybe that would help. Maybe I need to quit trying to make up a setting and instead base it on somewhere I’ve actually scene. Heck, I could stick the castle on top of the hill in Buena Vista and throw it back in time. Of course, I won’t actually do that because that’s not quite what I’m looking for. My point ( I love how I say there is a point, when really I’m just thinking through my conundrum; it’s not as though I’m trying to convince anyone of an actual point) is that I’m going to need to look at something and describe it because apparently my imagination is not good at coming up with imaginary lands.
I guess I know what I’m doing tomorrow, you know, during all my free time…
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