Fresh originality is fleeting. I’ve given up on being “Original” because damn near every possible storyline that could ever be hold HAS been told. The trick is to tell YOURS in a way that no one has ever heard before.
What a Twist!!
Sorry, channeling Robot Chicken there for a second.
The more that I think about an avenue that I want to take Gestalt down, the more the little voice in the back of my head beats it down, says it’s cheesy, has been done, don’t make sense, isn’t interesting, et cetera. I loathe that voice to the very core of my being. It’s not that the voice stifles my creativity, it’s just that it weeds out all of the undesirable filth that floats through my head at any given moment. Epic characters are made to have epic story lines, so why can’t I find the correct boulevards and strings to knit that pathway through? Gestalt will be long, I know that, but I don’t want to end up like Anne Mccaffrey with a good idea and terrible execution. No offense to Dragon Riders of Pern fans, but there really is such a thing as too much explanation. She has such brilliant ideas and clogs her work with slow, coma-inducing description.
Once again a happy medium has to be attained. So I look up plot-generators and hook lines and tweak and twist and flesh it out . . . and delete. If it’s boring to me, it is bound to be boring to my readers. Twice now I have done this with a huge chunk of possible plot. That’s what gives me cause to fire my Muse. I WANT the characters to take on a mind of their own like they did in December. I wrote WELL in December. I loved December. But then January came and it was like someone pulled out the plug in the bathtub. Everything drained. My characters are still there, my goal: my bittersweet ending is still there, and they are all yelling at me to pave the way toward it. But someone stole my masonry kit, and, like the never-ending highway work in Austin, the construction on my Yellow Brick Road is suspended indefinitely.
Back to writing and deleting. I really have to stop caring about my first drafts so friggin’ much.
Cheers!
~Hoshi
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