![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Tricky Maneuvers
Aug. 24th, 2025 09:22 amI carved out yesterday to play with the Work in Progress.
Except the way that works is that I actually write better when I'm stealing moments to write from other obligations. Scribbling around the edges of things, as it were.
Confronted with an untenanted vista of time that I have to fill up somehow with words is daunting. You think you're gonna summon Shakespeare! He's gonna dictate from the other side of the ectoplasm, and you will effortlessly transcribe!
But the way it works is that you scribble a cluster of sentences (40 seconds), and then you sit there staring at them (20 minutes). Wouldn't that comma look better in another place? you ask yourself. So you move it. (Another 20 minutes.) Except it does not look better. So, you move it back. (Ten minutes.)
For fuck's sake! I scream at myself. This is a first draft. It doesn't have to be perfect. It only has to be done.
###
Yesterday's quandary: Backstory for the awful Mimi involved making up several OKStupid exchanges with clueless but innocent swains, and it had to be funny, plus Mimi had to be presented as simultaneously sympathetic and unsympathetic. (Tricky maneuver.)
Plus, then we must segue from backstory to present-tense scene on the porch.
And Daria has gone back inside the house, which somehow I feel moved to describe in a complete paragraph of French-existentialism-inspired prose that draws heavily on Jean-Paul Sartre's theories about the potential for nothingness.
For fuck's sake again, I scream at myself. This is a first-person narrative. You can break the fourth wall in any way you want to! That's the beauty of the first-person POV!
Anyway, the day was rather frustrating.
And I only wrote 800 words.
###
Because I can never not read, only I can't read fiction while I'm writing fiction—I have a semi-photographic memory and well-turned phrases will embed themselves in my brain so deeply I forget I didn't write them, and that, my friends, is a recipe for plagiarism—I am reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Benjamin Franklin.
Once upon a time, Walt Isaacson was my boss!
This was when he was the head of New Media at Time Inc., and I had just been hired to put People Magazine and Entertainment Weekly online.
I was not a direct report.
I remember feeling horribly intimidated by him at one rooftop party at the old Time Life Building in Rockefellar Center. The party was launching Pathfinder, which was what Time Inc was calling the browser they'd developed that they hoped would rival Yahoo!'s portal. Yes, Time Inc. named its flagship digital product after a sports utility vehicle.
If only I'd known Walt Isaacson was a history buff, I could have wormed my way into his attention.
Except the way that works is that I actually write better when I'm stealing moments to write from other obligations. Scribbling around the edges of things, as it were.
Confronted with an untenanted vista of time that I have to fill up somehow with words is daunting. You think you're gonna summon Shakespeare! He's gonna dictate from the other side of the ectoplasm, and you will effortlessly transcribe!
But the way it works is that you scribble a cluster of sentences (40 seconds), and then you sit there staring at them (20 minutes). Wouldn't that comma look better in another place? you ask yourself. So you move it. (Another 20 minutes.) Except it does not look better. So, you move it back. (Ten minutes.)
For fuck's sake! I scream at myself. This is a first draft. It doesn't have to be perfect. It only has to be done.
###
Yesterday's quandary: Backstory for the awful Mimi involved making up several OKStupid exchanges with clueless but innocent swains, and it had to be funny, plus Mimi had to be presented as simultaneously sympathetic and unsympathetic. (Tricky maneuver.)
Plus, then we must segue from backstory to present-tense scene on the porch.
And Daria has gone back inside the house, which somehow I feel moved to describe in a complete paragraph of French-existentialism-inspired prose that draws heavily on Jean-Paul Sartre's theories about the potential for nothingness.
For fuck's sake again, I scream at myself. This is a first-person narrative. You can break the fourth wall in any way you want to! That's the beauty of the first-person POV!
Anyway, the day was rather frustrating.
And I only wrote 800 words.
###
Because I can never not read, only I can't read fiction while I'm writing fiction—I have a semi-photographic memory and well-turned phrases will embed themselves in my brain so deeply I forget I didn't write them, and that, my friends, is a recipe for plagiarism—I am reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Benjamin Franklin.
Once upon a time, Walt Isaacson was my boss!
This was when he was the head of New Media at Time Inc., and I had just been hired to put People Magazine and Entertainment Weekly online.
I was not a direct report.
I remember feeling horribly intimidated by him at one rooftop party at the old Time Life Building in Rockefellar Center. The party was launching Pathfinder, which was what Time Inc was calling the browser they'd developed that they hoped would rival Yahoo!'s portal. Yes, Time Inc. named its flagship digital product after a sports utility vehicle.
If only I'd known Walt Isaacson was a history buff, I could have wormed my way into his attention.
