A sometimes half-arsed record of the process of writing in its' variegated many forms.

Monday, May 25, 2009

Making corrections in the editing room

So, now that I've nominally finished a first draft of the first act, I can for a brief minute see clearly how really bad the writing is. There are moments. Don't get me wrong. There are splashes of useful writing, but most of it has to be junked. Especially towards the end.
I was so caught up in trying to finish. In dashing for the finish line, I wasn't truly doing my best work or setting myself up to do my best work. It's frustrating how easy it is for the work to take over in importance from other things, and then when I'm not working, well, then all things go wrong.
But the first draft is done, and in my head now, based on the size and the projected edited size (which is 25-50 thousand words longer) of the first act, I'm thinking it'll have to be a trilogy. Three novels in three acts. 350-450 thousand words is waayy too long for one novel. They would have to be highly sequalated though. There's no way to make then totally resolved until after the third act. So the first two acts would be somewhat unresolved novels, which we know from experience is difficult for people looking for escapism.

But a competing desire is novelty. People want things that seem or are new as much as they want strong narratives, righteous heroes, or the escape. So, the slight alterations of the forms that I have in my head could be successful. Cross-platformality seems to be one of the paramount financial success factors, diversity in cultural dissemenation. A more democratic, more decentralized cultural creationary process is what I would like to see. Which we do see to a degree on the Net.

I won't get all up into all the crazy designs I have in my head about new ways to develop alternate perspectives on the same piece of art through alternate media, different forms. I'll just say that there are big ideas stewing. It's all just card castles and sand dreams, anyway. Big ideas blow around in the breeze. Sometimes they blow away.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

The process

All writers have their own process. All writers must find out for themselves what works for them. And what doesn't. They must wander in the wilderness (or maybe that was just my requirement) for all of eternity trying to make sense out of senseless worlds in a work of fiction that both makes sense but also shows how that sense is in direct conflict with prevailing culture mores or how it gives us a deeper sense of what the unburied, unbridled, unconstructed, and dismanipulatedness of the clear-viewed pure culture has, is, and will always be, remaining untroubled by the human manifestations of the sharply narrow views of that all encompassing, all embracing cultura. Just a reworking and remolding of the nature of humanity through the conscious attempts towards exploitation, vapid escape, and a decidedly narrowing process of human awareness.

So, the truth is that culture, can be glimpsed by art, music, film, TV, but that glimpse is just the atomic smash of denting, destroying, Thatonotic, twisting. [to be con'td at: A Hyperanaphlaxis Univeral Mean]

My process is one of facetly layered levels of interconnectedness with the true autobiographical elements of my life, but filtered through a philosophic imagination. That's kind of how this whole novel project came about. I was finishing up a pretty quick, 40ies style inde flick, and the end of the screenplay there's a character trying to write a novel.
And so it occured to me as I was writing some of the last narrative overlay from the actual film, it occurred to me that I should write a novel about a character who wants to write screenplays.
Early on the idea that he would enter into the scenes he'd written, and that that would play havoc on his life, as he was becoming a character in a film, the script of which he was writing himself.

Well, that's quite a condensation of the first act, but true. let's just say this before I get my podcasts up. I promise some top shelf podcasts of the story, probably through podiobooks.com.
And maybe my insights, possibly vid/blog of my ideas. I actually have a half hour breakdown of an early screenplay I wrote. I need to review that shiite and get it going.