Full Steam Ahead

Revising continues to feel fun. As I sort out more and more of my creative projects going elsewhere, I have more time to return to Warlock’d. Having something on each page of the script — no matter how poorly-written — makes it feel like there’s something there to be molded. I’m not returning to some document that I must brute-force til the end. I’m reading some of my own writing and actually seeing what to do next, if not a clear trail marker then little bits and pieces, acorns and feathers.

I’m not sure how well my pacing is going this draft. I could be writing too much. However, snipping and adjusting also feels easy when I get to do it. Writing too much is better than not writing at all. So, I think it may be best to reserve pacing judgement for Round Two. The reason I feel confident leaving the pacing in the scenes alone right now is because I workshopped an outline which I am largely sticking to! The outline still makes sense to me and it’s very helpful that it wasn’t rushed. The writing I’m doing sticks to that outline. Therefore I don’t have to worry.

I’ve had a few people insist that I am much too hard on myself and it’s preventing projects from coming out — which is true — but I don’t actually think I’m too hard on myself. I think I’m lacking the sort of environment that can churn out a lovely polished story every few months (like a writer’s room for a TV show).  The projects not coming out or not being finished is still a problem, just not in the context of my quest to become someone who can wrangle a decent set of words. Like, no. People have to learn how to do things. Learning takes time. I’m not going to let anyone convince me to sit on my stuff as if it’s all right, when I myself am not totally satisfied with it. That’s actually really bad for my mental health!

We’ve been watching Only Murders in the Building and I have to say, the main trio of podcasting detectives has great charisma. Maybe the show is more of a comedy than a mystery, or maybe I’ve been looking at the sausage factory too intently and know too much about how the sausage is made, but I don’t feel any suspense or sense of gears turning as the plot progresses. Mystery writing used to have that feeling to me, like the author was logically laying things out.

But, maybe I should feel more free to view the mystery genre as a storytelling device. Characters, settings, and plot twists are vehicles for making something clear about a story being told backwards. Maybe the genre is also about setting expectations to an audience. In a fantasy story you generally expect the Hero’s Journey, so you have to do a fresh take on that and no amount of replacing horses with birds can do that for you. In a mystery, a relatively simple happening becomes complex with misdirections, mostly carried out through dialogue.

What I would hope for with Warlock’d is a simple murder story, but characters simultaneously progress and sidetrack that story. This all leads into a moment of fantastical wonder, with implications for the real world. But I don’t know how to do this, other than have a ton of dialogue and anecdotes towards the beginning, flashback abuse, and then plod towards the magical scene that reveals the tone of the whole thing.

Anyway. This would be so much easier with my own personal writer’s room. I think anyone would agree with that! But hey, I’ve never claimed to write literature here.