I have had one spectacularly wonderful writing day. (I edited this from "hellaciously wonderful" which accurately reflects the twistedness of the event of writing to "spectacularly wonderful" which better reflects how I felt when it was over. Writers worry about these things. This is why they do not give us the red button on the big nuclear silos. We'd agonize over whether to call it red, maroon or deep burgandy while the restof the world blew up.)
And "day" being a loose term since I spent a lot of it staring at the screen and finding various and assorted ways to not write, until all of a sudden, I realized the next step. The "holy shit" moment when the twist is both so organic and so unexpected, I feel like I have just slam dunked something. Of course, I have just made it extremely difficult for my hero to get himself and the people he loves out of this jam, and this it the turning point in act one, but hey, that's what's fun about the whole thing. When I was working on the action comedy, I would throw up these sorts of obstacles and I was absolutely certain I wasn't going to be able to come up with a way out of it, but it actually made me more creative. I think if you write to a predetermined solution, you end up with "predictable" -- but if you write with "impossible odds" against your character and force yourself to delve really deep, you can come up with some seriously creative moves / characters. Moments like this? They are the juice, the elctricity, the thing that makes the writing worth it. This is what makes the act of writing a joy.
(Lots and lots of people want to have written, but they don't want to be a writer. I want to do the writing. I want to be painted into that corner and challenge my characters to see if we can get out of that moment without resorting to the cliche. I love this.)
Posted by toni at March 6, 2004 05:14 PM