{"id":5014,"date":"2009-07-04T12:34:55","date_gmt":"2009-07-04T16:34:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=5014"},"modified":"2009-07-06T12:02:28","modified_gmt":"2009-07-06T16:02:28","slug":"july-4th-momentary-freedom-from-self-consciousness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/july-4th-momentary-freedom-from-self-consciousness\/","title":{"rendered":"July 4th: (Momentary) Freedom from Self-Consciousness"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><object classid=\"clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000\" width=\"500\" height=\"404\" codebase=\"http:\/\/download.macromedia.com\/pub\/shockwave\/cabs\/flash\/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0\"><param name=\"allowFullScreen\" value=\"true\" \/><param name=\"allowscriptaccess\" value=\"always\" \/><param name=\"src\" value=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/qv343ai0EfA&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1&amp;\" \/><param name=\"allowfullscreen\" value=\"true\" \/><\/object><\/p>\n<p>So there&#8217;s this new writerly-blogging trend &#8212; not really a dangerous one, but it sure feels like one to a cautious soul like Yours Truly. Which is: throw caution to the winds. Post online something you&#8217;ve written, and&#8230; <em>ask for feedback<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">I think I&#8217;m going to try that, and I&#8217;ll get to that in a moment.<\/span> <span style=\"color: #999999;\"><em>[Whoops &#8212; too late!]<\/em><\/span> I&#8217;ve tried that, briefly, over the last couple days, and depending on how that works out I may post about the experience later.<\/p>\n<p>But <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">first I want to lay the groundwork.<\/span> I want to tell you about a sort of breakthrough I had last week, in working on <em>Seems to Fit<\/em>. (That&#8217;s <a title=\"Earlier RAMH post, about the WIP's new title\" href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2009\/07\/breaking-wip-news-we-have-a-title\/\">the WIP&#8217;s new title<\/a> &#8212; coming up with a final (?) title not the breakthrough I speak of now, although it was a huge weight off my mental shoulders then, and still.)<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>For about a week at the end of June, I drifted in the <span class=\"explannote\" title=\"writerly jargon: 'Work in Progress'\">WIP<\/span> doldrums. Oh, the early-morning writing sessions were continuing. Continuing <em>unproductively<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The problem? Let&#8217;s start with what the problem was not. It wasn&#8217;t:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;What comes next?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Do I still believe in my story?&#8221; (nor the nasty correlative, &#8220;Do I even like it anymore?&#8221;)<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Can I really write?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;How can you possibly think of writing at a time like this, when <span style=\"color: #999999;\"><em>[insert calamitous personal, household, or worldwide event]<\/em><\/span> is going on?&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Why bother writing anyhow? You know the odds against writing &#8212; against writing professionally, successfully, <em>happily<\/em>. Are you nuts or something?&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>No, the problem was, maybe, one which you&#8217;ll not have to face yourself: <em>I knew too much about my story<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, again: at the time, it didn&#8217;t even have a freaking title. But other than that, I had waaaay too much information at hand. I&#8217;d written one full draft, one near-full, and one partial over the course of 15 years before undertaking this latest and final version of the story. I had research notes up to my eyeballs, many of them now superfluous because I, jeez, I&#8217;d been reading and thinking about them all that time. I had a plot, and I had the background information about the characters participating in that plot, and I, I , I&#8212; holy crap, I was just <em>overwhelmed<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>That was my problem, see? I&#8217;d lost sight of the central story, the story-that-counts, the skeleton on which everything else hangs. You know, like&#8230; like&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Let&#8217;s say you&#8217;re building a shed. (It&#8217;d have to be you; I sure as hell don&#8217;t know anything about shed-building.) You&#8217;ve got the 2x4s and the floor and the roof in place. Time for the walls. <em>The fun part!<\/em><\/p>\n<p>But instead of proceeding, straightforwardly, with sheetrock or whatever the hell else you use to make walls with (you&#8217;re an artist, after all), you grab a big sheet of newspaper you&#8217;ve been soaking in glue and you hang it in place. Looks okay there, and once it just sets up a bit it&#8217;ll be just fine &#8212; especially if you then layer another sheet over it.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and then another.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;and then another.<\/p>\n<p>Before long, you&#8217;re no longer even laying on new sheets of what will become papier-mache walls. You&#8217;re just throwing wet gobs of newsprint at the damned thing. Do this long enough, and what you end up with no longer resembles a shed, or even a shed-to-be. It&#8217;s just a big&#8230; <em>lump<\/em>. And no matter how much you paint over it, it will never be anything more than a lump &#8212; colorful, maybe, and maybe even exquisitely, artfully colorful. But a lump. A big steamin&#8217; heap of dried, drying, and still soggy papier mache.<\/p>\n<p>You stand back and look at it and think: What the hell am I <em>doing<\/em>?<\/p>\n<p>That was me. And that was <em>Seems to Fit<\/em>-in-the-making which I regarded, for a week, with my hands on my hips and my mouth full of sawdust (and newsprint, and glue).<\/p>\n<p>So I said to myself: Suppose you were to tell your story to an audience who&#8217;s interested only in the story &#8212; an audience who doesn&#8217;t care about metaphorical or stylistic curlicues or hidden meanings or the details of the characters&#8217; pasts and their inner lives? What would the story look like?<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s when I thought: <em>It would look like a fairy tale<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>So I sat down a week ago today, greatly excited, and typed &#8212; yes &#8212; <em>Once upon a time<\/em>&#8230; Hit the Enter key a couple times, and then typed: <em>&#8230;happily ever after<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>And then I spent not quite a week filling in that big gap, from ellipsis to ellipsis. Result? <em>Seems to Fit<\/em>, in fewer than 5,000 words. (It is, in fact, uncommonly short for <em>any<\/em> piece of fiction from me; I tend to write at lengths of 7K words and up.) True, I didn&#8217;t entirely resist the temptation to throw in some of that curlicue stuff. But it was like painting the studs, not painting the papier mache. See?<\/p>\n<p>But now that I have it, I&#8217;m kinda curious. If I put the fairy-tale version of the story before a sampling of random adults, I wonder, what else do they think it&#8217;s important to know?<\/p>\n<p>Which brings me to this rather complicated &#8212; and for me, completely scarifying &#8212; proposal:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>For about 48 hours, until noon on Monday, July 6th, you can download a PDF of <em>Seems to Fit: The Fairy Tale<\/em> <a title=\"Whoops - too late!\" href=\"http:\/\/\"><span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">here<\/span><\/a> [86KB PDF].<\/li>\n<li>If you read it &#8212; and making allowances for my hiding certain details, since I don&#8217;t want to tell you <em>everything<\/em> that happens &#8212; I&#8217;d appreciate a note, via email (***NOT IN A PUBLIC COMMENT HERE***). In this note you&#8217;d let me know what <em>kind<\/em>(s) of other information you think the story needs. If you don&#8217;t have an email address for me, well, look around. You might start at the <a title=\"About RAMH\" href=\"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/about\/\">About<\/a> page.<\/li>\n<li>There&#8217;s no obligation to provide any feedback at all, of course&#8230;<\/li>\n<li>&#8230;but some suitable (?) reward awaits those who <em>do<\/em> provide it. (Probably not due and payable until publication date, though. Heh.)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>One final caveat:<\/strong> If you don&#8217;t want to know <em>anything<\/em> about what happens in the book until the whole thing is available, please don&#8217;t read the fairy-tale version!<\/p>\n<p>________________<\/p>\n<p>P.S. Yes, of course I know about plot outlines, plot synopses, all the rest. In a way, that&#8217;s all I&#8217;ve created with this fairy-tale thing. So, no big deal &#8212; except that if I&#8217;d said to myself, <em>You need to write a synopsis. You need to outline the whole thing<\/em>, well, let&#8217;s just say I&#8217;d still be staring at the screen. (And so would you. Elsewhere, no doubt.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So there&#8217;s this new writerly-blogging trend &#8212; not really a dangerous one, but it sure feels like one to a cautious soul like Yours Truly. Which is: throw caution to the winds. Post online something you&#8217;ve written, and&#8230; ask for feedback. I think I&#8217;m going to try that, and I&#8217;ll get to that in a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12,37,5,209,372,515],"tags":[33,1306,1309,1310,1311,1312],"class_list":{"0":"post-5014","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-03_runningaftermyhat","7":"category-onlineworld","8":"category-06_writing","9":"category-the-business","10":"category-style-and-craft","11":"category-grail","12":"tag-e-books","13":"tag-seems-to-fit","14":"tag-feedback","15":"tag-critiques","16":"tag-fairy-tales","17":"tag-the-tricks-writers-play-on-themselves","18":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-1iS","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5014"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5014\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5029,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5014\/revisions\/5029"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}