Back to the drawing board. I need to pivot on Surrealist. However, I don’t know what way I want to pivot. This will likely be a temporary thing as I delve back into brainstorming and actually go through and outline this project. Once through outlining and brainstorming, my hope is that the drafting process will run smoother and quicker.
Progress
I tried to write with no (or very little) outline when I am normally an outliner. This did make sense at the beginning, as making this story freeform and figuring out much of the worldbuilding and themes made more sense through discovery. However, I’ve run as far as that method can take me and must go back to the drawing board. This pivot has made me stall out a little bit, as I got some hard critiques from my writing group, along with having issues I was already seeing.
Aside from stalling out, I made decent progress on Surrealist this month. I averaged about 800 words a day and reached 33k+ in the draft before stalling out.
This is a passion project more than any of them have been before, and that makes the highs really high and the lows extraordinarily low. I am unsure if I am in a state of burnout or not, but between all my projects, my full-time job, and life things, I am feeling a bit at the end of my tether and more exhausted than I care to admit. Each time I think I will have a reprieve, something else happens. Normally, in cases like this, my writing is a soft place to land that helps me right myself. However, this project is difficult. It is stretching me, just as I knew it would. That is, in the end, a good thing, both for the project and for me. I am still on a fairly steep incline of my learning curve with writing, which is a great thing, but it is not an easy one.
Leisure
I’ve watched a couple of new movies, Ballerina and Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning. I liked both of them. They were both the movies that I expected, and I went to the theater to enjoy. I’ve also started watching Pretty Little Liars again and started watching The Rookie. As for reading, I’ve been trying to read some of the pieces for the Hugos so that I can vote this coming month, but I’ve made far less progress than I would have liked. Then I’ve been researching and reading for Surrealist to try and make it what it desires to be.
What I’m Learning
It is truly amazing how much the way I feel about a project can swing from week to week, and the more excited and happy I am with a project, the deeper the descent.
I have found that I can not let myself just play when I’m writing anymore. I tried that with Surrealist, and it didn’t make any sense to my writing group. This is a really hard thing to discover. Sure, playing for a little bit at the beginning was helpful to discover where the story wanted to go and where it shouldn’t, but I cannot just let my imagination do all the fun stuff and pay no mind to that which is difficult.
I was not a good writer when I wrote as a kid, but I really enjoyed it. My stories were unwieldy and had tons of holes in them. I’d never gotten to the end of one before 2020. That is because I had no idea how to create a story; I just had ideas and a whole lot of passion. Now things have shifted, and I thought I could go back and just play, and the craft would take care of itself as I’ve done the work to understand it, but that only works if you have an outline. There can be too much freedom and not enough planning, which is what I’m having to correct for now in Surrealist.
I have so much passion for this story and for writing in general that it can be difficult to keep in check. I want to explore and just write, and sometimes I can do that, if the plot idea is simple enough, but there is an end to where I can push myself at any one time and in any particular draft. This story is already more character-focused than plot-focused, when characters are a decidedly weak point for me. I did that on purpose. I chose to work on something character-focused to try and grow and make myself a better writer, but it also means that I am going to struggle. Things are hard, and that’s okay, more than okay, it’s the desired path.
Looking Forward
There is so much that I need to figure out from themes to actual syntax, but I do believe this story could be a great one. It is a passion project, and I love it even in its half-formed state. I’ve put so much of myself into this story, perhaps not as characters but in the very fiber of the book, the themes, and everything about it. This first exploration is very much my stream of consciousness, which makes sense that other people would find it strange and confusing. Now I need to go through and make this very difficult-to-understand manuscript understandable.
Likely what will happen going forward is that I will reuse some of the scenes that I’ve already written that my writing group hasn’t seen yet, but I need to work on the actually language used as I have ideas that are important to the character development and themes of this story that revolve around language and the style of the prose. Even though I didn’t initially outline this piece, I did brainstorm it and work on the framing. The framing of the book is integral to the experience, and I knew I had to think about it before getting started. With the plot, it was different. It felt like a chicken or the egg situation where there was no chicken or no egg, and it’s very hard to create an egg with no chicken and a chicken with no egg. It’s even harder to conceptualize such a thing without knowing of its existence.
Other thoughts
I don’t know if anyone is interested in a blog on Neologisms and the creation of language, but that is a huge part of what I’m doing with Surrealist. I read an article on Roald Dahl and his use of neologisms across his work, and it is a fascinating topic. Perhaps as part of my process with writing Surrealist, I will work on a series of blog posts on the research I am doing and some of the process of creating Surrealist. I’ve always had the idea of doing other blogs besides my monthly ones in the back of my mind, but I want to make sure it is something that I can both see through and won’t bog down my other writing. This has the potential to help me out of my funk.
There seems to be a difference between the way that Roald Dahl created language for his books and J. R. R Tolkien or someone who is more focused on the language itself rather than as a vehicle for learning, comedy, and deeper understanding of the fantastical nature of the works.
I grew up reading Roald Dahl and came up with my own neologisms as a child, often of the portmanteau variety. I would say a new “not real” word and get a mischievous look on my face before dashing away, according to my brother. This is something I am trying to capture in Surrealist. Language can be used dynamically rather than just as a vehicle for getting one’s point across, and I really plan to play around with my language usage in this book. It will be a jough tourney (that’s a spoonerism) and a bit bamboozlish, but in the end I imagine it will be mighty good fun.
Much of the tension with Surrealist is with the fact that it will take a larger amount of time than I would like. I think this is the sort of piece that I could spend years revising and revising, but that is neither my style nor something I am willing to do. But, as always, I want to give it the respect and attention it deserves. I hope some day, in the not-so-distant future, you will be able to read it.
Naomi
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P.P.S. It is my five-year anniversary of starting my first novel.
