I got this comment from Violet to my "the desire to write" post of yesterday:
Robin, you don’t know how this encourages me! From some other things
you’ve said on here, I had the idea that you had a bumper crop of
characters and plottings always in the granary…. So whew! Knowing you have to work at it too is a relief somehow, and a permission to struggle on!
Oh, dear. I hate to be misunderstood!
I’m pretty sure that this particular misconception came from my statement that "ideas are a dime a dozen." I stand by that. Ideas are everywhere. But every idea isn’t worthy of a novel. Every idea isn’t worthy of a chapter or a scene or a paragraph either. Some ideas are just … ideas. Most of my ideas come not full-blown but as little niggling sensations in the gut. There aren’t even words for them yet, and I have to go scrounging for what that niggle means, what my subconscious is trying to tell me.
Yesterday, I rewrote the same page about ten times. (Unfortunately, those ten pages don’t count toward my weekly writing goal — those have to be new pages.) I’m in a scene that I know is the right scene, but I can’t seem to get the words right. I can’t seem to figure out what the viewpoint character should be thinking or saying or doing. Here is what I know after writing 47 books before this one: I’ll find the answer. I may struggle a day or I may struggle a week, but eventually, the answer will come.
In the movie, Something’s Gotta Give, the Diane Keaton character is stymied early on. Been there, done that! But later, she starts writing like a fiend, and she tells Nicholson that the words are "flowing." Am stymied, longing for the flow!
Writing, like life, is a process. We just have to work it through.
-rlh-
Ah Robin, I knew when I put up my comment I should have checked to find the post of yours which gave me that idea. It’s here, on February 10th, where you wrote: “I would venture to say that most novelists, when they were children, were able to entertain themselves for hours on end without the need for television or radio or even books, although most of us escaped into books for hours, too. Our imaginations took us to other countries, other worlds, in an instant. Me, I was most often a wild stallion, thundering across the vast Western mountain country.”
I drew from this that you have always had a lively and fruitful imagination, which still translates into many ideas.
Now as someone who wasn’t particularly fanciful as a child, I have labored under the conception (and perhaps it’s a misconception) that fiction writers have something in their genes — some innate story-creating ability (and may manifest itself in childhood imaginations, like yours did) which sets them apart, and makes fiction writing come easily and naturally to them. Your ‘confession’ in “The desire to write” that fiction writing is hard work for you too is, as I said yesterday, reassuring to me.
I probably read too much into your childhood memories. Sorry if I misunderstood you. But your frankness about how you work at this — well, it continues to give me hope.
Ah, to niggle! I actually looked it up, and it means to trifle with pottery, especially on seemingly insignificant details, making them better. Isn’t that what we writers do? It’s the niggling that gets to the interesting parts of the idea. The good writers, like Robin Lee Hatcher, are “peripheral visionaries,” seeing the things off to the side that most people miss, then making them come alive.
I am glad, Robin, that you clarified this for us, because I admit I had the same feeling Violet did about being a bit deficient in the childhood creativity department. My imaginiation was not encouraged when I was a child, and music and art and theater and writing were not thought worthy pursuits, so I tried not to go that direction, until I realized I just couldn’t stop myself.
So I am something of a late bloomer in the creativity department, but I think there’s hope for me yet–and even moreso when I realize that all authors struggle to get it right. BJ Hoff has been letting her readers know that it doesn’t come automatically to her, either, and we fledgling authors appreciate hearing that…
Robin, you’ve turned into a blogging machine! Love everything you share with us here. Thanks.