Where to start? Another blank page stares at me two days after my last submission and I am bereft of ideas. My first instinct is to just write off the top of my head without thought to the route to the end or even as to where the destination might be found. Should I posit a character and then surround it with complications, compulsions, or contradictions? Maybe I should think of a problem and then solve it - but no, that never works. Perhaps I can contrive a series of improbable events and populate them with seemingly intelligent, but actually brutally stupid, actors. But what kind of events would be interesting? What sorts of characters would find, much less allow, themselves to be involved?
You see the problem: the entrances to the maze of plotting are many as are the exits but the core of the maze, the intricacies of turns and twists, and the barriers to a straightforward plot will always be clouded. Each turn presents new challenges, each twist a new character who, incidentally is just as confused about their part as the protagonist. Then there are the trap doors of non-sequiturs, grammatical snares for the unwary, and the dead ends of failing imagination. Characters multiply like ants at a picnic, wandering into and out of the narrative with few lines to speak and fewer descriptive details. Some even have the temerity to possess names!
Often one can crawl thousands of words into the maze only to find they've strayed so far that there is no hope finding where they started or even a hint of where the next passage might take them, let alone show them an easy path to the exit. You may force yourself through more thousands of words only to discover suddenly that the tissue of lies you have been telling is crap and on exposure likely to drop you into a pit of shame. It appears to have been so much wasted effort.
You are lost, hopelessly, bitterly lost.
You could go back to find a more inviting way to begin, retrace your steps to discover where you could have turned a better phrase or altered a scene, and bravely struggle onward, all the while wondering if those the paths you ignored might have been better choices. But at this point, you've become so invested in your course that you feign to discard it. Yet you stumble on, keeping your eyes on the prize until, at last, you reach an end, any end.
And begin to edit.
#SFWApro
You see the problem: the entrances to the maze of plotting are many as are the exits but the core of the maze, the intricacies of turns and twists, and the barriers to a straightforward plot will always be clouded. Each turn presents new challenges, each twist a new character who, incidentally is just as confused about their part as the protagonist. Then there are the trap doors of non-sequiturs, grammatical snares for the unwary, and the dead ends of failing imagination. Characters multiply like ants at a picnic, wandering into and out of the narrative with few lines to speak and fewer descriptive details. Some even have the temerity to possess names!
Often one can crawl thousands of words into the maze only to find they've strayed so far that there is no hope finding where they started or even a hint of where the next passage might take them, let alone show them an easy path to the exit. You may force yourself through more thousands of words only to discover suddenly that the tissue of lies you have been telling is crap and on exposure likely to drop you into a pit of shame. It appears to have been so much wasted effort.
You are lost, hopelessly, bitterly lost.
You could go back to find a more inviting way to begin, retrace your steps to discover where you could have turned a better phrase or altered a scene, and bravely struggle onward, all the while wondering if those the paths you ignored might have been better choices. But at this point, you've become so invested in your course that you feign to discard it. Yet you stumble on, keeping your eyes on the prize until, at last, you reach an end, any end.
And begin to edit.
#SFWApro
