A funicular, if you are not familiar with the word, is an inclined railway that runs up a slope. There are some technical minutia around cables and counterbalancing, but the point is that, like Sisyphus, a funicular is constantly struggling to push its burden uphill.
Writing ‘VVV’ has been a lot like that. At the moment I have an 8 600 word manuscript on hand – nudging it past short story and into the novelette category. (7 500 to 17 500 words – or about 30 – 90 minutes’ worth of reading time.)
I am not used to writing being such a slog, but at the same time, as I mentioned, things have been very jammed up and switching gears like this to figure out why feels like the way to go.
I don’t have a lot of direct wisdom, but I have figured out two things:
I waste a lot of time feeling ashamed for struggling, which is, I suspect, not uncommon.
I also find myself stuck in a situation where my aspirations and standards for what my writing should be collide with the fact that failing to meet those aspirations and standards does not mean I made something bad.
In combination, these things are creative poison – struggling leads to shame leads to slowing down, which means making fewer attempts at getting something made. Having these crazy high standards for myself and aspiring for a masterpiece every time means that I feel intensely discouraged when I’m not quite there, or when I make something pretty good but different to what I set out to do. And that means less joy at creating something.
Writing VVV has helped me figure some of that out, and hopefully I can build on the realizations – but, these are things I often need to re-learn and re-explore over and over until I find a workable pace for what I’m trying to do.
I think VVV is, at the moment, in a murky place where from one point of view I can see it’s pretty close to being something I can share, and from another I am devastated at how much it isn’t what I planned it to be.
I think I may need to lean more into the first perspective and maybe even edit it in a way that makes it less like what I set out to achieve and try and build on the strengths actually in it… but that is a thing to try and achieve over the next week or so.
My deadline for being done with it is the end of next week, but… plans are murky at the best of times, lately. We’ll see what happens, but I have a first draft in my pocket.
Following my original plans, I will take some time off after that, and the last week or so of the month will be spent figuring out my next short/novelette/novella project.
In the meanwhile, thank you for your support and your interest. I hope I have something to share soon, depending on how I feel about the revisions!
