A productive day is a day on which at least 2000 words pile up.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve been dealing with 1000 word days, 850 word days, 1600 word days, even 1854 word days…but the clear-sailing ahead 2000 word days have been thin on the calendar.\u00a0\u00a0 Today was one of them, plus some.<\/p>\n
As icing on that cake,\u00a0 most of that was written in a chapter that is technically difficult.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Here’s the problem (and it’s one that happens repeatedly in long works.) \u00a0 Characters sleep.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Characters fall off horses, walls, roofs…they are beset by enemies who give them a whack with a branch or a rock or a barrel stave.\u00a0\u00a0 They get drunk and pass out, or someone puts a little something in their drink.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Inevitably, in the kind of stories I write, people lose consciousness (one way or another) and then regain consciousness (one way or another.)\u00a0\u00a0 And inevitably, sometimes the circumstances of losing (or regaining) consciousness are plot-relevant.<\/p>\n
And yet…because it happens often enough in enough books–there’s a conception that if a character wakes up not knowing where she\/he is, especially if the character is surrounded by impenetrable fog, or in a plain white room, or in the dark, or bobbing on a raft in the middle of an ocean, the writer wrote that because the writer is stuck, facing a blank page or computer screen with no idea what to do next.\u00a0 Er.\u00a0 No.<\/p>\n
But the trick then is to help the reader understand the plot-relevance and not yawn and think “Well, here it is, the old woke-up-not-knowing-where-she-was cliche again…stupid writer, why not solve your own problem and write something better?”<\/p>\n
Even I, who have had a generally placid and unadventurous life, have had several instances of waking up confused about where I was, when I was, and what had happened.\u00a0 Two involved concussions (one without apparent loss of consciousness, according to witnesses, though there’s almost an hour gone from my memory) and one I still don’t understand except as an effect of post-travel exhaustion.<\/p>\n
So anyway–today’s task was to write a scene in which someone with a traumatic brain injury wakes up, is confused, passes out again, wakes up again–and so on–and over time re-acquires the concept of language but not the person’s memory of the past.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 From an interior POV (and I could use my own experience of waking up in confusion) and without boring you-the-reader (I hope!) while keeping the reader oriented to person and time while the character isn’t, and then bring the character to the point where the character’s able to interact with someone else–who can inform the character of a few facts and transition the character into being self-aware enough to do what the character has to do next.<\/p>\n
I’ve been thinking about this scene for a week or more, in the background of other writing.\u00a0 It’s the kind\u00a0 of\u00a0 scene that needs to be written all in one day (one afternoon\/evening, it’s been)….it’s over 2000 words, because there’s a lot in it the reader needs to know about this person–the reader needs to understand what has “come back” and what is “never coming back” in terms of function, in order to understand (if not anticipate) the choices the character will make later on.<\/p>\n
And it’s done, and it’s not perfect, but it doesn’t totally suck large granite boulders, either.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Everything the reader needs to know at this point is in there.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Not much if anything the reader doesn’t need to know at this point is in there.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The character’s confusion (which could be lots longer) is as short as I can get it and not leave important things out. \u00a0\u00a0 I left it for a couple of hours to watch stupid TV shows and clear my head, and coming back to it a little while ago…yeah.\u00a0 It’s OK. \u00a0 Getting it done is my excuse for eating a whole bag of chocolate covered caramels, one by one, through the writing.<\/p>\n
It will of course need revision.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I need to think more about the punctuation choices I made.\u00a0 To me, the ellipsis (the dot-dot-dot thing, for those who don’t know, which most of you do) is a good choice for uncertainty and confusion, but too much of anything leaches the meaning out of it.\u00a0 But that’s for another day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A productive day is a day on which at least 2000 words pile up.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I’ve been dealing with 1000 word days, 850 word days, 1600 word days, even 1854 word days…but the clear-sailing ahead 2000 word days have been thin on the calendar.\u00a0\u00a0 Today was one of them, plus some.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,61,5],"tags":[106,62,107],"class_list":["post-1568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-contents","category-craft","category-the-writing-life","tag-contents","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1568"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1570,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1568\/revisions\/1570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}