The writing fever

The writing fever is back. I think I'm really trying to find my own voice as a writer. When I read my writings of the last three years, what I see are distinctly derivative plotlines and voice.

And for now, I'm fine with it. I'm finding the right niche, and when I hit it, I think it'll be clear. It seems the easiest at this learning stage to find a mold I like and try to fill it. When the mold feels really right, I can smash it to bits and start all over again.

The first two years of NaNoWriMo, I worked on light-hearted, historically inaccurate Regency Era romance novels (not Regencies, which are a more specific subgenre). The third year, I worked on a Young Adult novel about falling in love for the first time, experiencing loss, lacking control and agency, and struggling with difficult family relationships.

I've been tossing around ideas for this year already. One of the themes I want to explore is the ability to draw a clear line between your current decisions and the past events of your personal history that inform those decisions.

Love is such a strongly motivating theme for me -- and I don't mean just the light-hearted headiness/excitement of early love, but the maturation of love, the complexities that make it a struggle, but something worth fighting for, nonetheless. There is something so basic, so integral to the human experience about reaching out and finding someone with whom you can create this new thing that is your family and your lover and your best friend, new and separate and different from the close-knit friendships and beloved familial ties that had come before, that the very idea that you can tell a complete story of someone without this serving as the backbone is bizarre to me.

[Note to self: learn to write better sentences.]

I don't really have a plot together yet, and I don't know who my characters will be. I feel like I'm drawing a lot from my readings of Jennifer Crusie's works right now, having just finished "Anything But You". Her writing is indeed light-hearted, but the real, subtle strength lies in her ability to draw on real-life hurdles and insecurities, and showing the growth of her characters, rather than relying on external circumstances or inane misunderstandings to drive the plot. It took me reading three of her books to pick up on that, because this common thread is subtle and well-crafted.

I find myself listening to conversations, picking up lines from tv shows or books or songs, trying out different stories in my head. I'm starting to understand what writers mean when they say they are always filled with stories.

The key is to harness that process and work on it actively, to pick out where the strengths are and where the weaknesse are, to pay attention when and why stories are being told well and what has gone wrong when they are told badly.

That's essentially the same process that Seppo actively applies when he's playing or thinking about games. It's a valuable lesson I've learned from him. It's so easy when I'm just reading for pleasure to become a lazy reader and letting the words just take over, instead of an active participant in the narrative and understanding when the author is doing a good job of leading me down a path and when the author is clumsily dragging me over painful mounds of pointy stones.

One of my weaknesses is the inability to be succinct and direct. I need to be able to let the actions drive the story and show the internal motivations of the characters, rather than tediously describing how they feel, thus, how the reader should feel about a scene. It'll take practice and constant active analysis. But I enjoy that, so it should come relatively easily. :)