Saturday, March 3, 2012

An inspirational moment

I'm sitting here working on writing Lilith from a 1st person POV... and it's not quite as easy as I was hoping. But... I am not discouraged yet. I think I just need to rearrange my own POV, not expect things to go exactly the way they did the first time around, and keep moving forward.

And then I read this quote from the amazing Neil Gaiman's latest blog post:
"It's a weird thing, writing.
Sometimes you can look out across what you're writing, and it's like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer's day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you'll be going on your walk. 
And that's wonderful.
Sometimes it's like driving through fog. You can't really see where you're going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you're probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you'll still get where you were going.
And that's hard while you're doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn't exist in that order down on paper, half of what you'd get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.
And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you're doing and where you're going, and you couldn't see or know any of that five minutes before.
And that's magic."
Thank you, Neil.

5 comments:

  1. Is this the Biblical Lilith or some other character? :D

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  2. Nice Gaiman quote. He sure can turn a good analogy.

    Good luck, stick with it, and the POV changes get easier. You might find that you need more practice in the POV before you get it right for you and your character, but stick with it. Remember that a changing voice is totally normal, and if you have to do a whole scale rewrite, it is not a failure.

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  3. Wow, Hildred... I didn't even know about the biblical Lilith... but a quick google search told me a lot. There are some interesting aspects I could use from that character, but no, this one is of my own creation. Although... now I'm intrigued :)

    Thanks, Rena... I do need practice... and I'm sure a whole scale rewrite is in my future somewhere. What is it they say about drafts? The first one is garbage and the 8th one is ... well, maybe still garbage, hah! I'll get there one day.

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  4. Amazing quote!!! Thank you so much for sharing. He captures the process perfectly, the clear moments and the foggy ones.

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  5. That's an incredibly cool way to describe it and fits exactly into the way it is.

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