indri

Recently

peasant_ pointed me towards this post on storytellers versus cathartic writers. I recognise myself more in the description of the cathartic writer -- I write mainly to get the buggery images out of my head -- although of course, it's nice to entertain people as well. (I wrote for years without anyone reading what I wrote; it's the writing itself that's most important to me.)

But last night I was struggling with the Fred-Illyria story I've been working on for months and I realised it was the sort of piece that I wanted to have written but it's not the sort of thing that I wanted to write. I really want someone to write a story about the heart-warming but slightly odd Burkles and their fractured relationship with their much-changed child (Illyria as a metaphor for PTSD) but it's not going to be me. I was playing with second-person POV and enjoying the cadences of east Texan speech, but most of the plot over-relied on dramatic irony, on the audience knowing much more than the viewpoint character. And I've been there and done that and, faced with yet another piece of dialogue that had to mean three different things simultaneously, I threw in the towel. Begone, formerly-tentacled bane of my existence!

And then I sat down and wrote two thousand words of Drusilla story. Two thousand words! I can't tell you how long it's been since I wrote that much in a single day. Apparently, Drusilla's just been sitting there, impatiently, waiting for Fred to get out of the bloody way. It was glorious. I had begun to think that I couldn't remember how to write at all.

We'll see how long I can keep this up and whether Angelus comes to the party, as he really has to for the story to work.

While I was writing, my first piece of concrit from the Concritathon arrived. I haven't looked at it yet, in case it jinxes the flow. I will look later. And I seem to have helped at least one of the people I was critiquing.

Now I have to go to work after writing until one am and then waking at six with another scene in my head. Lord, but Drusilla's demanding.