Writing Continuity

This goes out to all of you who struggle with interruptions, large and small. To those of you who do not get interrupted, I hate you.

It's the large interruptions that are the worst. It goes beyond interruption, call it a break or even a hiatus. The common one is that annoying thing called sleep. I'm writing, in the flow (or at least I can see it from here), and the day ends, or I have to go to work (except I'm retired). When I did work, I'd write at lunch, but then I'd have that work interruption again. Around this time of year, it's holidays. Or a cold. What they all have in common is that hours and even days pass between writing sessions.

I don't know about you, but when that happens, it's really tough to recapture what I was feeling. Oh, I know where the plot was going, but getting back to the precise mood and insight feels like trying to get back to where a dream left off. I grasp at phantoms, the echo of emotions.

Lately I've been doing two things. They're obvious things, and you are welcome to snort at their plain attire when I introduce them, but the fellow next to you may find them helpful. First, I read before I go to sleep. Not other people's work, *my* work. The last scene I wrote, however many pages that is. Then I turn out the light and refuse to look at phone or tablet. The last thing my brain gets to see is those words.

The other technique I borrow from Hemingway. Before writing each morning, he would read the previous chapter. I don't go that far, but I'll back up a scene or two. It takes me maybe five minutes, maybe fifteen minutes. It's the closest I can get to finding the re-entry point of my emotional state, my perspective when last I left off. For shorter interruptions, I do the same, but I don't back up as far.

I am doing this after years of not doing it (how's that for obvious?). Each time I returned to the writing, I was parachuting in from a different point, and I think my prose suffered for it. There are places where you can practically hear the gears shifting. Even more, I simply couldn't connect with what was already there, I can to the page with a different emotional timbre, and I would simply start afresh, or even write the same scene differently--trying to play the same song but with a different instrument.

So, there you go. Your mileage and all that, but I do believe it's helping me. Time to return to the dream.

 

To give a damn, you need to build up a reservoir of damns, with a damn dam. (sorry, couldn't help myself)

Having a dim damn is a problem, but I think it can have multiple sources. With some stories, I just wanted to see if I could tell the story; it was almost technical exercise. With other stories, I had an idea or a character and I wanted to see where I might go with it, so it was more of an exploration. Those are tough because sometimes the territory explored turns out not to be very interesting, or the character didn't have as many dimensions as I'd thought, or I simply plotted myself into a corner. I have a few stories like that, which I've put in a place I refer to hopefully as the backburner. Purgatory is probably closer to the truth.

Then there are stories that matter. Those are the ones where it's the theme that caught me--I actually had, or thought I had, something to say. Motivation has been trickiest there because at times I feel highly motivated while other times I feel terribly discouraged, and neither state seems explicable or predictable. Or manageable.

There's another scenario, which is writing to a deadline. Your proposal has been accepted and your publisher has given you a date. Writing from avarice and fear. Motivation's not usually a problem with that one! I've tried tricking myself by inventing deadlines for myself but I see through the ruse every time, and have yet to be motivated by that.

You may have noticed, if you are still reading, that I haven't given you any solutions. Clever reader! The best I can suggest is this: take a little time to decide why you are writing this particular story. If it's just exploration, or to find out if you can really do this writing thing, then you probably don't have sufficient reason to press on. You've hit the doldrums. You have no port to make for, you're just sailing around. You're going to have to find some better purpose.

But if you were once inspired, but now all seems insipid, then you have probably lost your way. Try writing backstory stuff. Write a scene from a character's childhood, or love life, or anything not directly story-related. Try jumping forward in the story to some scene you do expect to be interesting.

Or, try writing out of the neighborhood entirely. Start some other story. Put this one on the ol' back burner. The idea is to keep writing *something* even if it isn't *this* thing. It's hard to say what works. What doesn't work is to stop writing.