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Writing update & vacation nostalgia plus PSA

Posted by SiriuslyPeeved , 13 April 2012 · 304 views

writing point of view plot planning real life butterbeer

Writing update & vacation nostalgia plus PSA

It's been a week or so since my last entry, wanted to stop by before my week 'o' family fun offline begins.

I took the photo at Universal Studios Orlando in September, 2010. Hogwarts was just stunning at sunset and nobody wanted to leave, despite the very polite security folks gently herding us toward the exit.

  I hope that by the time I get to take my kids there, (I actually went with grown-ups my first time -- heh) they'll have expanded that area into the more dated parts of Islands of Adventure.  Who else thinks the "Poseidon" dark walk-through special effects ride would make a super Gringotts?

Sigh, that's enough vacation nostalgia for me for today, I'll drive myself crazy thinking about frozen butterbeer... Om nom nom.

Writing is going okay even if I haven't been able to complete or post a chapter in a while.  I'm working on the aftermath to chapter 4 of Rowan and Phoenix.  (no spoilers here, since I know some of you are still reading the first volume!)  It's challenging to get the tone just right.  I think I've written it three times and from two different points of view.

One thing I'm trying to do to make Rowan and Phoenix less of a headache to write is to not switch points of view so often.  I wanted to show so many facets of the story in Unwritten, I went overboard with POV characters. (who me? heh)  I'm using only four or five core characters as points of view this time around.

(Methinks i may have read too much George R.R. Martin in the years while writing Unwritten.  Major characters offed ..... too many POVs..... check, check

  )

Original fiction is going better than fanfic this week.  I have had a few chapters out to some good friends from here and other boards, and I'm so grateful for the feedback!

It's brought a lot of strong emotions back to the surface -- writing will do that to you if you are sufficiently "into" the material to write it well, a hidden hazard of creative work; you find yourself with this whole heavy duffel bag of past issues which have come up from the bottom of the subconscious.  Yay, duffel bag of heaviness!

Fiction is a good way to make things you never understood make sense.  Luckily fiction needs to make more sense than real life, or realistic fiction does anyway.  And it can help make the duffel bag lighter, slowly, over time. That's one of the reasons I write, anyway, because I need to.  It's play for me most of the time, but at other times, it's deeply needed work.

I don't know how many of you have read "Something To Fight For" (15+, Fabian / Marlene)  but it is adapted from the same YA project I am working on now, and it's very close to my heart for that reason.  It was inspired by a close friend of mine who was killed in a car accident when we were seniors in high school.  It doesn't seem to matter that it's been nearly 19 years.  As I revise that chapter outside of the Potterverse, I'm reminded to bring you all a public service announcement.

SP-the-mom says, please wear your seat belts whenever you ride in or drive a car.  Thank you.  Have a happy & safe weekend. :wub:

aiedailweasley

Apr 13 2012 05:02 PM

I also write chapters several times for the right tone, so I can understand that that's frustrating

Also, yes, I feel that fiction and even just our knowledge of words and how to use them and when operates on a subconscious level while we're writing. I write poetry (not that I'm going to brag of my skill or anything because it's all in fun and I'm not sure skill is even part of the picture lol), and sometimes I write a word and don't really get what it means till I come back to the poem weeks, years later, but it was startlingly spot-on.

I have read Something to Fight For, and I remember being totally floored and awed. Part of the strength and beauty of stories is that some of them, like this one, come from a place of real, tangible pain and experience. I think it's very brave of you to write something that way, knowingly, like it seems you've done, as a way of learning about the experience and yourself. I'm in a creative writing emphasis at my uni, and we talk about this quote from Robert Frost all the time: "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." Obviously it doesn't mean that you have to be crying while you write in order for your readers to cry (though we did talk about that possibility in class the other day

), but it means that things that a writer is invested in emotionally will also be able to translate that experience and emotion to a reader, even if nothing like that has ever happened in her life. For me, with Something to Fight For, I also felt something; I know that it was several scale down from the depth and maturity of your own feelings, but I believe that that translation is a powerful and sort of awe-inspiring thing.

Okay, SP-the-mom, I will always wear my seat belt!! I always do but I will doubly remember now.

I hope you're weekend's great, too :wub:

Renfair

Apr 13 2012 09:57 PM

Thanks for not posting spoilers to "Unwritten." I'd smack you upside the head with a composition notebook if I ended up reading something by accident. Hmmm, I'm also totally stuck trying to finish chapter four in my sequel. Is it the cursed chapter number or something? Is the taint of Privet Drive's mundaneness somehow seeping into our stories and subduing them?

I haven't been to the Universal Studios Harry Potter craziness. I've actually never been there or two any of the Disney parks at all. I'd love to go there sometime, but I'd probably have to go in the middle of winter because the idea of being in Harry Potter land while it's 90 degrees out and humid sounds like some sort of torture to me.

Reaching into that duffel bag of heaviness makes for some great writing, though. I'm glad you've been able to work on your original stuff, and that it's continuing to be cathartic for you. And I always wear my seatbelt. My dad was an EMT when I was little, so that got ingrained in me at a very young age. Unfortunately, people still don't do it. A few weeks ago, there was a very bad car accident with four juniors from my old high school that collided head-on with a (fortunately empty) school bus before school (AND it was the morning of the junior prom). It was very bad and all four had serious, some life-threatening, injuries. I would be willing to bet that they were probably texting as well as not wearing seat belts. I should check and see if there's any updates on them. I guess teenagers won't ever stop doing stupid things. It's kind of a rite of passage, unfortunately, so when you get old like you and me, we can look back and shake our heads.

SiriuslyPeeved

Apr 20 2012 08:30 PM

Thank you Lily and Renny... :wub: