Breathing Words

It has not been easy motivating myself to pick up my novel-in-progress. I am, in fact, SO CLOSE to finishing. Three, four chapters max. But again, I’m stuck in one of my moods where I feel so defeated by the story and completely unsure of my skill as a writer. But I know it’s all bunk and doesn’t ultimately matter because the point is to plow through, edit, edit, edit, and not be a lazy, whiny baby.

So I had an idea.

Hopefully it propels me back into my novel, and doesn’t sidetrack me, but I decided to start a private blog, written by my fictional family. There are multiple things I hope to achieve with this exercise:

1. Currently, my novel is multi-perspective, third person point of view. Perhaps I need to simplify it. Pare it down to one character’s POV, possibly make it first person. Writing blog entries will help me find the right voice, I think.

2. Capture the feelings of characters regarding specific events in the novel. Chinese people are so cautious about showing their true emotions, and my characters fall into that trap. I need to delve deeper into them.

3. Re-think, review, re-organize certain events. The plot is not as smooth as I’d like, and the blog should help me visualize better.

4. Keep me writing even when I don’t want to.

5. Help me enjoy the company of my characters again.

As a bonus, I made the commitment to stay away from things like facebook and myspace for the entire month of October. I am too easily distracted by the little games and little updates on everyone’s lives.

A week or so ago, T and I were having a conversation about my funk, and he said that I needed to do something just for myself. I didn’t really understand his statement at the time because wasn’t lounging around all day watching re-runs of “Wings” doing something for myself? But the truth is, that lounging made me feel extremely guilty. And his supportive attitude about it made me feel even more guilty! I knew intellectually that I was being spoiled and childish. That everyone was working so hard at whatever it was they were working at, and here I was, able to enjoy time to myself, and still not being happy about it.

It drove me insane. So of course I would compensate for my guilt by doing household things–cleaning, re-decorating, buying too much stuff under the claim that we need it for our apartment (which isn’t a false claim… we do need everything I got, but maybe just not all at the same time…).

Anyway, I’m not entirely out of my funk. I didn’t have an epiphany or a visit from a muse telling me to pick up the pen again. I didn’t even have a new plot idea or scene pop into my head in the middle of the night, which is often what propelled me in the past.

No, I just decided that T was right. I didn’t have anything of my own. Doing something just for myself, by myself, something that belonged only to me. It’s always been writing ever since I could write. I’ve fallen away from it several times in my life, sometimes by choice, though most often because I got sidetracked by something electronic. This time I got sidetracked (on purpose) by all the wedding things. But now, it’s time to go back. To go deeper into myself than I have been with the not-so-clever facebook updates and truncated blogs linking to random pictures.

I said I would finish my novel by the New Year. Perhaps I’ll have to postpone that deadline to the Chinese New Year… but it’ll get done. Fortunately, I’ve told too many people about this deadline, and I’m too proud to not follow through on it.

Now to the other blog…