Slow scene

Maybe it’s because I’m on vacation. (Um, yeah, btw, we’re in North Carolina for the week with the hubby’s parents…) Hard to get any solid writing done.

Or maybe it’s because I’m writing a Saeli/Brendan conflict scene, and that’s harder to do from Saeli’s head. I dunno. It ought to be easier, because I’ve got a solid pipeline to Saeli’s internal state of mind. But for some reason, I’m having a hard time generating the necessary emotion to make this scene work. The scene needs to happen, and it needs to happen onscreen. It escalates the tension between Saeli and Brendan, so that Brendan’s later drug experimentation and subsequent explosion at Saeli makes sense. Otherwise, Brendan is going to look like he’s overreacting, and the reader isn’t going to have a clear idea why.

However, maybe I’m trying to milk it too much. Maybe it needs to be extremely short, and maybe Brendan actually holds back a lot of what he’d like to say. I was going to have this fight undermine a lot of the confidence Saeli has just gained in Raphel…but reading that just now, I’m realizing that I can’t do that. I mean, we’ve just had a big reveal in the story. I’ve turned Saeli’s world upside down, and she needs to ride that for a while. Her thoughts need to marinate before I dump the next big thing on her.

And to some extent, I want Brendan’s blow-up at the graduation party to shock Saeli. She needs to know he’s upset, but I don’t think she or the reader needs to know just how much the boyfriend thing has been eating at him until it all comes out. Brendan’s pain is a major consequence of her joining forces with Raphel, and as such, it needs to hit her at the appropriate time.

So this little fight needs to be short and bitter, but not too intense. What needs to be revealed at this point?

-Brendan thinks Saeli has a boyfriend. Because:

-Brendan ran into Cara while looking for Saeli. Cara, concerned because Saeli hasn’t returned to campus yet, and feeling guilty about lying to Brendan in the first place, tells him the truth and sends him after her. This, perhaps, will also create a little tension between Cara and Saeli. Saeli’s going to have to keep lying to keep Raphel a secret, and this will have the effect of isolating her from her Mantle friends.

-Brendan was coming to tell Saeli that he’s earned the gold and white, and that they’ll be Anjahel together. Finding out that she tricked him in order to sneak off campus to meet a boyfriend has completely ruined this much anticipated moment for him. Thus, he is not happy.

However, the crux of his anger is not specifically that Saeli has a boyfriend. Rather, he thinks she had a boyfriend when they talked in the infirmary, and he thinks she deliberately kept it from him. He also assumes that’s why she tricked him in order to sneak off campus. Brendan is feeling like he’s being played by the girl he likes, and that really hurts. I think that’s the reveal I need to save for the graduation party. Let Saeli assume Brendan is mainly mad about the sneaking out, and then let the truth come out later, at the worst possible moment.

I think I know where this scene needs to go now. Note to self…if a scene is going slowly, maybe there’s something functionally wrong with it, and I need to step back and analyze what I’m doing.

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Tags: Brendan, Cara, Saeli, Shades, writer's block

When the muse would rather do laundry…

…then I know I’ve hit a rough spot in my writing.

I think my dislike of laundry stems from the fact that, unlike other household chores, you can’t just get it over with. You put the clothes in the washer, and then you have to go do something else while they wash. This can either be productive, like cleaning the kitchen or writing, or unproductive, like browsing the internet. I hate writing while the laundry is going, because I’m either going to forget and leave wet clothes in the washer for hours, or I’m going to be interrupted when the clothes get done and lose my train of thought. Then you have to move them to the dryer, and wait some more. Then you have to hang them up. (As the hubby will confirm, I tend to skip this step…by the time the clothes finish drying, I’m too tired/bored/irritated to do it).

Most of laundry time consists of doing other things while the clothes are washing/drying. That should be great, except that it’s not. I can’t leave the house, or do anything that’s going to make me forget about the laundry. It’s irritating, because I cannot allow myself to become absorbed in another project. I don’t want to start anything because I know I’m going to get interrupted. If I have to do a household chore, I prefer to just take a block of time and get it done. Laundry, until they invent instantaneous washers and dryers, is not a chore you can do that with.

My writing, as I mentioned in the last post, goes sluggishly. I’ve hit bumps before, but this one makes me particularly nervous because I’m writing what ought to be the most exciting part of the story. If I’m not feeling the excitement, how the heck are my readers going to feel it? I know part of this is just my desire to be done, which is sucking the enjoyment out of the process. The main problem is that I know how the story ends. In order to get there, certain things must happen in a particular order. I have this all plotted out…I know where everyone needs to be, what they need to do, and what needs to happen. However, I’m a natural seat-of-the-pants kind of writer, so writing to a script is difficult for me. I like to have a general idea of where things are going, and then let the characters get there however they will. I especially like it when they surprise me. However, in writing this climax, the stakes have changed a little.

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Tags: Mora, Raphel, Saeli, Shades, writer's block, Yuril