Parlour Tricks

[fivecats]

1925
February 2006 Raleigh, NC
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When I sit down to type out an entry, say, like this one, I simply sit and I type.  The words flow fairly easily, with few hesitations or concerns.  I think, I type.  Pretty simple, really.  People I used to write letters to told that my writing reads much the way I talk (to me this means "full of grandeous self-importance, occasional humor and overly long complex sentences that make me really glad I never learned how to diagram a sentence because I might feel bad about how overly long and awkward they really were.") which I regarded as a compliment.

So then why is "real" writing so dangedably difficult?

I'll spare you the whining,
After putting a lot of time and effort into long, long blog entries that would take days to write and re-write, I stopped blogging completely to devote my time to writing my Victorian-era kids novel.  That was the theory, at any rate.  I got a rough draft of a part of the first chapter written down (now lost) and then found myself seeking out all sorts of other distractions to keep me from writing.

Writing letters and blog entries is just so much easier.

And then, last August a good LJ friend (who I hope doesn't mind me anonymously quoting him) wrote to me, praising my writing in my blog entries and posed a question to me that stopped me in my tracks.

"I'll ask you the same question someone asked me a decade ago: With all your magical talents, do you you really want to spend your time doing nothing but simple parlor tricks?"

Man, I just hate it when someone nails me like that.

No.  Of course not.  Hasn't that been the goal all along?  Getting published?

Still, I find that I'm very comfortable with one style of writing (self-obsessed ranting and raving, turning Real Life into personal narratives) and original fiction is like, well, worse than pulling teeth.

The other night I sat down to write out the first chapter of the Victorian-era book.  It's a scene I've played over and over in my head for well over a  year.  It's a good scene, a good start to the book, with action and more than enough confusion to keep the reader interested and wanting to read more.  When I started writing all that was coming out was stilted, dry, boring prose.  No, actually, it was worse.  It was dismal, pathetic and dreadful.  Horrid.

However, I resisted the tempation to CTRL + A, Delete everything.  Instead, I dutifully saved what I had written and walked away from it, trying to figure out what had gone so horribly wrong.

A couple of years ago I had a job interview with RIT for a teaching position.  As part of the day-long interview I had to give a 45-minute lecture on a subject of my (their) choosing.  XML was the topic of choice and I frantically learned everything I could about the relatively new markup language.  I then learned PowerPoint, created my lecture slides and started rehearsing.  I rehearsed in front of friends at work, at the airport, on the airplane, in the hotel room the night before.  Just before the lecture was supposed to start I took a few minutes to review the slides... and it was if I'd never seen this material before.  All of  my clever, witty insights?  Gone.  Any semblance of understanding the information, much less being able to communicate it?  Wa-a-a-a-ay gone.

I fumbled through the first few slides, committing the PowerPoint sin of reading exactly what was written on the slides.  Then, after a few minutes, I hit a stride and, managing to shut my conscious mind off, I was able to get through the rest of the lecture about as cleanly as possible.

Performance anxiety, pure and simple.  Big crowd of college professors sitting in judgement of me, sitting between me and my dream of becomming a college professor.

I can stand in front of a large audience and be comfortable -- heck, I taught for enough years to not have that bother me much anymore.  Still, when it counts, at least in my mind, I panic and freeze up. 

I've decided that the "you have got to be kidding" bit of writing that I did for the first chapter needs to be viewed as the barest of frameworks for the house I'm eventually going to be building.  I just need to get the ideas down there and then start idenitifying and filling in the holes.  Those large, cavernous holes.

I've also backtracked and started sketching out those first scenes, identifying what's missing (any sense of place, time, the smells, lighting, dress, etc) and begun making notes on where to insert these all-important items.

I know I can do this.  It's just being far harder than I thought it was going to be.


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