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elfsThe writer stares with glassy eyes
Defies the empty page
His beard is white, his face is lined
And streaked with tears of rage.
Thirty years ago, how the words would flow
With passion and precision,
But now his mind is dark and dulled
By sickness and indecision
And he stares out the kitchen door
Where the sun will rise no more...
I woke up with that, "Losing It" by Rush, as my earworm this morning, which may as well have been a omen of the rest of the day's reading to come. In my inbox to read this morning is Jim Van Pelt's Angered, Disturbed or Frightened: Can't Tell, which is Van Pelt's response to Scott Taylor's thesis that only young men can write vibrant science fiction and fantasy, and as we get older we lose both our grip on what it means to be young and vibrant, and the organizational skills necessary to write concise, powerful fiction. Van Pelt, eleven years older than I am, vehemently disagrees. I wish I could.
Because the other writing-oriented article in this morning's paper is John Scalzi's Writer, Professional, Good. I have been paid for both a short story and a novel, so I guess in some sense I'm a professional. I haven't written anything for market or love in a while, but I guess I'm still a writer.
For the past week, I've been trying to write a very simple girl's love story with a the straightforward and well-worn theme of city girl/country girl. The city girl is a Sterling (but she's still really a girl) from an nth generation socialist polity, the country girl is a Terran engineer cybered to her core who loves her family land in the highlands of southern Argentina, where her Dad maintains a sheep ranch and an apple orchard. Our commie crypto-lesyay is also carrying a deep, shameful secret about her mission to Earth, and yet is strongly attracted to this short, tomboyish, competent, socially awkward "in a way she hasn't felt in a long time." They have so much to talk about, and overcome!
I used to write one of these a week at Moorcock speed.
Scalzi points out that there's a third category of writer, the "good" writer, is the one who is confident enough in his craft that he can, with will and intent, push the reader into the mental state the writer desires. I seem to have lost that. Maybe I'm out of practice. Raising two children and having a career will do that to a man. But even worse, it just feels like I don't have it in me to write like that. This ought to be just 3,000 words, the first chapter of a four-part story (12,000 words in all, very Moorcock/Dent) in which our heroine comes, because of the love and understanding of others, to appreciate that honesty and integrity are more important than her career or polity.
I wish I knew what was going on. My brain has been wonderful when it comes to writing software-- in many different development environments (in the past week, I've written for Node, Coffee, Couch, Haskell, Perl, and Python, not to mention all the CSS and HTML)-- but when it comes to writing, my brain cells feel cast in concrete.
Defies the empty page
His beard is white, his face is lined
And streaked with tears of rage.
Thirty years ago, how the words would flow
With passion and precision,
But now his mind is dark and dulled
By sickness and indecision
And he stares out the kitchen door
Where the sun will rise no more...
I woke up with that, "Losing It" by Rush, as my earworm this morning, which may as well have been a omen of the rest of the day's reading to come. In my inbox to read this morning is Jim Van Pelt's Angered, Disturbed or Frightened: Can't Tell, which is Van Pelt's response to Scott Taylor's thesis that only young men can write vibrant science fiction and fantasy, and as we get older we lose both our grip on what it means to be young and vibrant, and the organizational skills necessary to write concise, powerful fiction. Van Pelt, eleven years older than I am, vehemently disagrees. I wish I could.
Because the other writing-oriented article in this morning's paper is John Scalzi's Writer, Professional, Good. I have been paid for both a short story and a novel, so I guess in some sense I'm a professional. I haven't written anything for market or love in a while, but I guess I'm still a writer.
For the past week, I've been trying to write a very simple girl's love story with a the straightforward and well-worn theme of city girl/country girl. The city girl is a Sterling (but she's still really a girl) from an nth generation socialist polity, the country girl is a Terran engineer cybered to her core who loves her family land in the highlands of southern Argentina, where her Dad maintains a sheep ranch and an apple orchard. Our commie crypto-lesyay is also carrying a deep, shameful secret about her mission to Earth, and yet is strongly attracted to this short, tomboyish, competent, socially awkward "in a way she hasn't felt in a long time." They have so much to talk about, and overcome!
I used to write one of these a week at Moorcock speed.
Scalzi points out that there's a third category of writer, the "good" writer, is the one who is confident enough in his craft that he can, with will and intent, push the reader into the mental state the writer desires. I seem to have lost that. Maybe I'm out of practice. Raising two children and having a career will do that to a man. But even worse, it just feels like I don't have it in me to write like that. This ought to be just 3,000 words, the first chapter of a four-part story (12,000 words in all, very Moorcock/Dent) in which our heroine comes, because of the love and understanding of others, to appreciate that honesty and integrity are more important than her career or polity.
I wish I knew what was going on. My brain has been wonderful when it comes to writing software-- in many different development environments (in the past week, I've written for Node, Coffee, Couch, Haskell, Perl, and Python, not to mention all the CSS and HTML)-- but when it comes to writing, my brain cells feel cast in concrete.
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no subject
Date: 2012-01-29 07:20 pm (UTC)I read the Scalzi article too. I almost always find him nicely articulate.
Hajimemashite!
Date: 2012-02-01 04:23 am (UTC)Yoroshiku onegaishimasu!