Terror and dreams

Still with the process questions, starting with “What in the writing process TERRIFIES you (gives you bouts of anxiety)…and how do you push through it? For example, a blank page is both terrifying and exciting at the same time…”

I think I spent ten minutes staring at that question, trying to formulate an answer more coherent than “What?” Because I have a hard time imagining writing being terrifying. Climbing cliffs is terrifying; hearing the phone ring and having the first words be “Your mother had a stroke last night and is in the hospital” is terrifying; spinning out on an icy freeway overpass when I didn’t know whether I was going to go over the side onto the lower freeway or slam into the cement median is terrifying.

Writing? Does not compare in the slightest. Because those other things have serious real-life possible consequences ranging from emotional trauma to serious injury or death. The only consequence of screwing up a scene in my writing is that I’ll have to rewrite the scene. Or possibly the story won’t sell. Absolute worst case is that the story does sell and the editor doesn’t point out that the scene needs to be redone and the thing will be published and I’ll be embarrassed in public. But it isn’t like I’m a surgeon; babies won’t die if I mess up a scene, a story, or even an entire novel.

(Um. Just so you know: I didn’t fall off the cliff, but I’ve been nervous about heights ever since. Mom died peacefully at home three weeks later. The car managed not to go over the guard rail or hit the cement barrier; I ended up in the center of the freeway in the narrow space between the barrier and the traffic lane, facing the wrong way. I spent about five minutes watching everyone coming in my direction figure out what had happen and slow down before they got to the black ice, and then there was a break in traffic long enough for me to get turned around and drive on. Trust me, writing doesn’t even come close.)

There are some things that I refuse to get wrong, but the idea of writing about them doesn’t terrify me. I don’t have to write about them if I don’t want to; I am perfectly capable of setting a story aside if I don’t think I can do a proper job of handling something, or if I’ve written it and, upon examination, it doesn’t do justice to one of those touchstones. There are a couple of things that have been in the to-write stack for years waiting for me to have the chops to write that particular story the way I want to write it.

It might be a problem if everything ended up in the “I’m not a good enough writer yet” stack, but I am also wonderfully stubborn about some things. If I think I can make something work, and all my test readers say it isn’t working, I badger them until I think I have a theory about why it isn’t working, and then I go off and rewrite it. Lather, rinse, repeat, until it does work.

There are also some things that I dislike writing. This is not the same as having an anxiety attack; I’m perfectly capable of writing council scenes and transition scenes, but I dislike doing them. A lot. I also turn out to have a really deep desire not to write contemporary-setting fantasy, which I didn’t know until I sat down to write the first few chapters of the current WIP and realized that if my characters didn’t get out of here a lot faster than that I was going to start throwing things or break my computer or something. Even so, it was basically a matter of a) cutting things back to make that part as short and tight as possible and b) buckling down and writing it so I could get to the fun stuff.

Next: idea sources. I have plenty of dreams, few nightmares, and no, they don’t end up in the books. They tend to be long and convoluted, and either they make no logical sense when examined upon waking, or else they are intensely boring, like the one that had about ten people arguing about how to purify the water supply in a cave. Boiling or chlorine tablets? Or the ceramic camping filter? Or the Rube-Goldberg contraption somebody whipped up? Or ordering from the survivalist catalog somebody else had? With endless technicalities and nobody ever getting around to making a decision.

Trust me, this would not make even a good scene, much less a decent story idea. I might be able to do something with the reason all those people were sitting around a cave arguing about the water supply, but I’d have to come up with it; it wasn’t part of the dream. And frankly, they weren’t interesting enough for me to want to write about.

I was going to go on some more about ideas, but the post nearly doubled in size and I wasn’t even half done, so that’ll be Saturday.