The Strangeness of Being
Jun. 6th, 2012 01:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lathrielThe manuscript. I am making progress. Through a frenzy of cutting, cutting and pasting, smoothing and sorting, the good bits of the new draft are blending chunkily with the good bits of the old. It's rough--rougher than rough--but it's progress. Real, satisfying progress.
For the first time in a very long time, I've been scene-fantasizing--those self indulgent moments or minutes where you act/write out an anticipated scene in your head even though it's not strictly productive to do so. Or, I used to think it wasn't. What good could it do to know every detail of a scene from the middle of book 3 when you can't even finish revising book 1?
Apparently, it does a lot of good.
These scenes, as self indulgent and almost self-fan-fic-ish as they are, exist in my brain because they make me excited. They rekindle my passion for the characters, the story. They remind me what the point of writing this story was to begin with, or has become. It turns out this indulgence is an essential motivator, an exercise that I have unwittingly practiced since I was very young... until, that is, I began to believe it was a waste of time because it did not always yield a practical result.
But it all makes sense, really, in such an obvious way. Of course the part about storytelling that I love, the rumination and immersion in the worlds they inhabit, the fantasizing about other places and people and times, would be essential. Of course the fun, "pointless" act of imagining would be a necessary ingredient for inspiration, and creative sustenance.
I am so silly sometimes.
For the first time in a very long time, I've been scene-fantasizing--those self indulgent moments or minutes where you act/write out an anticipated scene in your head even though it's not strictly productive to do so. Or, I used to think it wasn't. What good could it do to know every detail of a scene from the middle of book 3 when you can't even finish revising book 1?
Apparently, it does a lot of good.
These scenes, as self indulgent and almost self-fan-fic-ish as they are, exist in my brain because they make me excited. They rekindle my passion for the characters, the story. They remind me what the point of writing this story was to begin with, or has become. It turns out this indulgence is an essential motivator, an exercise that I have unwittingly practiced since I was very young... until, that is, I began to believe it was a waste of time because it did not always yield a practical result.
But it all makes sense, really, in such an obvious way. Of course the part about storytelling that I love, the rumination and immersion in the worlds they inhabit, the fantasizing about other places and people and times, would be essential. Of course the fun, "pointless" act of imagining would be a necessary ingredient for inspiration, and creative sustenance.
I am so silly sometimes.
