|
|
The Questions Made Her a Witch
November 21, 2004, 10:53 p.m. Today Salome (a recent addition to my circle of friends) and I trekked up to the Elf-boy’s house for a coven meeting of writers. We’re each working on novels at the moment, and we were going to read aloud from them, as well as from works that had ‘inspired’ us to write. Elf-boy read from Fight Club, Salome from Great Expectations, I from a short story by Isobelle Carmody, The Witch Seed. I enjoy reading things aloud, and listening to them be read aloud – on the train trip up and back I made Salome read from Great Expectations, doing all the accents so deliciously. But I don’t like reading my own stuff aloud. Ugh. I hate my own writing at the moment. I’m really jealous of Salome’s style. She had this lovely extended metaphor in her work which she read out. I just seem to plonk down words to explain what’s going on in the story in this awful, plain way with only a cursory reference to any sort of literary flourishes. I love my world, I love my characters. I know them inside and out – snappy, awkward Saoirse; aloof, careless Diarmaid; poor, beleaguered Liam. I know their talents, their fears, their desires, what’s going to happen to them and what has happened. I want to write their stories – but I just hate, hate, hate how I’m doing it. I want to get it all out so people can start writing fic for it. I have no confidence in my own words, my own interpretation. Elf-boy reassures me that I’m a good writer, that my style doesn’t suck – but I want it to be so much more than that. I want that scrumptious turn of phrase that Salome has. But I’ve already written 22,000 words in this style – I balk at the thought of going back and changing all that, changing my style. You can’t exactly do that mid-stream. I sometimes grow weary of my story as well. Why do I always write fantasy? I want to write something real, something recognisable. Something that has a precision to its depiction – with fantasy, you end up describing everything in broad strokes because you can’t really, truly see what you’ve never actually experienced. But if I were to write what I know – capture it all and put it down in black and white text, colour it with my turns of phrase and imagery and such – I would love that. But every time I sit down at keyboard, all that pours out is fantasy. I am grown half-sick of these shadow worlds I create. I want the real world, real experience, real life as I live it. Alas I never have any ideas for stories that exist in this real world I long to write. (PS I’m all excited that Casey won. Yes, I am sad, but it’s the only election this year that’s gone the way it should.)
|