Message Board Topic 6/7

[Comicality]

When you're constantly stretching your creativity, the muse can strike you at any time without warning. And sometimes, those ideas can seem like pure genius upon your first imaginings of how things are going to go. Plots and characters and themes that have never been done before. You can truly get the calling to write something truly beautiful...and the ambition to pull it off can be intense.

 

But, the ambition doesn't always match the inspiration. Meaning that sometimes, taking on such an ambitious project can be an intimidating experience. What happens if it doesn't turn out the way you imagined it? What if you get to a point and get stuck? What if your readers don't like it? What if the whole project falls apart before you even finish? What if it just plain sucks? The thoughts can bully you into a corner and you might find yourself lost for ideas, simply because nothing can possibly live up to your own expectations at this point. What happens to inspiration when thought has to become deed?

 

The question this week is...do you ever feel 'intimidated' by your own stories? Where you really want something to be this magnificent work of art, but your expectations are so high that you worry about not doing it 'justice'? Let us know what you think!

 

 

 

[Graeme]

Not so much 'intimidated' as being unable to maintain the vision. A few times I've lost that vision of what the story is supposed to be, or I've been unable to put that vision into words, and the story has died as a consequence. I'm still struggling with one of those stories, and I hope to get it completed, but it's a challenge

[Agincourt]

I would use the word "daunted" rather than "intimidated."

 

I'm about 65,000 words into a novel-length story that will end up being about twice that long. It becomes increasingly slow going because I keep banging up against the inadequacies of my own level of skill and craft.

 

What's weird for me is that the story started out fairly simple, but once I started setting up the initial characters and situations, I discovered that I had a far more complex, textured, and interesting tale to tell. I have a fairly clear idea of where I want to go, and the feedback I have gotten on the installments I have published so far (as a guest author on a membership site run by another author) has been extremely favorable. But in order to move further I need to solve some knotty problems of "how to get there from here." I know generally where I want to end up, but there is some tricky stuff to maneuver in between. And I constantly have to resist the urge to wander off onto interesting tangents that don't really help the main story, or to allow incidental developments to expand and swallow up the overall narrative. In other words, I have to constantly remind myself to remain true to the story, and not try to tell several different stories at the same time.

 

The thing is, I don't think I'm intimidated, because I don't have any serious doubt that I can pull off what I want to do eventually. I just have to learn how. Indeed, I think I have grown tremendously in craft just in the course of the writing I have already done, if for no other reason that I now know several major weak points that I need to avoid getting in trouble with (like scenes with many characters all doing things at once -- I find these nearly impossible to write). But as I look at my "to do" list of story issues that need to be resolved, it does seem somewhat daunting because there is a lot of work ahead, and the answers to some of my issues have not yet made themselves known to me.

 

As I remarked privately to the author who is hosting my work-in-progress, I should probably have tackled something a bit less ambitious for my first major outing. He agreed wholeheartedly, and confessed that he made the same mistake with his first story (a long and complex tale available on Nifty and many other places on the net). So at least I feel as though I'm in good company.

 

A

[JamesSavik]

I know that on occasion the size and the scope of an idea exceeded my craft.

[Nephylim]

I have to say that I don't relate to any of this. I suppose it's partly the way I am and partly the way I write. I have a tendency to jump in at the deep end in everything I do. Whenever I start something new I start the complicated rather than the simple version. I have no patience with tutorials etc. Hah... maybe that's why my home is filled with half completed proects and I have a dozen skills half learned.

 

And the way I write is that I have a new idea and then i sit and write it. The story writes itself as I go along. I never work to a structure and every time I have tried to it hasn't worked out. Maybe it's a case of not knowing what you don't know. If you don't realise what a huge task you've taken on then you can't be intimidated by it.