cimorene

You know when you start drawing a person without a clear image of the whole body in your head, and you start in a weird place, and then as you move out into the rest of the body you don't pay attention so you get something wrong? And then when you finish the whole thing you're maybe baffled and you don't know why it looks wrong until you eventually realize that you took a wrong turn somewhere and drew the neck sticking out too far so the whole body is in the wrong place now, or you got the angle/perspective/whatever wrong because it's meant to be 3/4 profile and the entire left side of the body should be closer to the viewer and so the shoulder is too long which is making it look enormous or else like it's in a funhouse mirror? Or whatever.

Anyway. The point is that at any given point in a drawing if you just are looking at the last little bit you drew, and the next thing you draw matches that, you can still fuck up pretty badly in terms of the last bit not matching the first bit. You can kind of... veer off course.

And I think that happens with stories too.

I was looking at the folder of (long) abandoned WIPs, again, because of how I had that laughable resolution to try my hardest to actually get rid of some of them and I... haven't actually posted any this year (I got rid of 2 of them in 2011! ... But they were the two shortest ones I had).

I was looking at this one story, and I did actually have a rough plot idea in mind for it, but it was one that refused to ever become fleshed out no matter how much I worried at it mentally, just a couple of snapshots of dialogue from near the end which, in all honesty, didn't need to have any relationship to the beginning I'd already written at all. And then I realized that that was because basically the entire second half didn't work because it was getting too cracky - and if I cut it, the entire plot idea would have to go too - leaving me with a vignette and a vague idea of the dialogue for a much-much-later romantic climax scene, but without any way whatsoever for the former to become the latter.

See... I have this problem where if I have two tiny little wisps of idea I am far, far too prone to try to combine them. Usually I forget about every other time I have done this and I feel proud of my ingenuity. I think my tiny rodent brain is usually narrating something like "Ooh, I've almost got enough to constitute a plot with that, and I didn't have to work at it at all! Score! I HATE thinking of plots!" - Which is probably the problem, in a nutshell. These combinations can be anything from "It's Sense & Sensibility AND an all-human graduate student AU!" to "He has to hide Jim in the Batcave while assassins are after him AND Jim has to rescue Batman for once AND Jim doesn't realize that they're dating AND Jim figures out his secret identity. By himself." I've had to surgically separate two misshapen baby WIPs that turned out not to taste great together... a lot of times. And even more often, I've just wound up with the result glowering sullenly from my WIP folders, where it burns a hole in my metaphorical pocket for years, without even figuring out what went wrong.

Sadly, I don't think this is the case with all my currently-languishing WIPs. (Because that is at least a marginally simpler thing to tackle than problems like "I can't write action" or "I don't want to write self-sacrificing angsty heartbreak from the POV of John Sheppard ever again".) But maybe I will be able to fix one of them, even if it is by amputating most of it.