Nothing getting done

[alex_beecroft]

On the plus side, I've tackled most of my email backlog from the holidays and am all set to start writing again.  On the minus side; Anglo-Saxon re-enacting at the weekend, and I've finished all of 1 new dress!

Arggghh!  So today, and possibly tomorrow too, will be spent madly sewing.  This is even more annoying as the Cornwall holiday book is fermenting in my brain and keeps going 'write me! write me!'  And *that's* annoying because I'm supposed to be finishing 'Secrets' first :)

Comments

[wulfila.livejournal.com]

I cannot give you any particularly helpful advice, but I can wish you good luck and keep my fingers crossed for you. :)

[hms-dauntless.livejournal.com]

In my personal experience, the plot-brewing moment is usually much more exalting and satisfying than the actual writing of the story. And I've noticed that every time I start putting my idea on a scrap of paper, the writing process itself suddenly become tiring and boring, and my mind runs away searching for alternative plotbunnies. However this phase usually lasts only till completion of the first draft. Once the skeleton of the plot is completely built and the story is written, roughly as it can be, from beginning to end, my interest and fun grow again and I enjoy adding details and situations and developing the original raw material. Probably, it's a bit like moving home. Finding the right place for the old furniture is hellish, because you start with the naked walls and nothing seems to fit, while arranging kniknacks and books is usually pleasant because you can test mny different solutions without too much effort. :)

[mrs-norrington.livejournal.com]

See, I find the ideas exciting, which may or may not stretch to the length of what I want the idea to be writing-wise.

It's the revisions and editing that gets me. Anything gives me an excuse to not do it...*g* I think now I've got an honest excuse (i.e. work and school and clubs), but that doesn't explain this summer...

Oh by the way, Mom told me she got your letter, and she sounded very pleased about it. ;) I'm at school, so I didn't see it, but it seemed like she was very happy.

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Well, the yellow dye worked on the trousers, but the undertunic remained stubbornly blue, so yesterday I made and finished an undertunic, overtunic and a dress. I found a pair of linen trousers in a charity shop which are exactly the right shade of iron-mordanted weld green and will be fine for Ailith for the weekend until I can make a pair without a zip! (It's going to be invisible under the tunic anyway.) So we're all dressed now, albeit temporarily :)

Now I just need to put a bit of embroidery on them :)

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

And I've noticed that every time I start putting my idea on a scrap of paper, the writing process itself suddenly become tiring and boring, and my mind runs away searching for alternative plotbunnies.

LOL! You're absolutely right! I think that's why I really want to write this other story - because the unwritten story is always so much better than the one you're trying to force into words at the time. It sounds as though your writing process is similar to mine - I find the first draft really difficult, and that's when I'm most inclined to go 'oh, it's so rubbish!' and start something different. I've only managed to get into a habit of finishing things by ignoring that feeling and carrying on with the first until it's done, before I start on the second.

I like revising too! It is like having the room already made and painted, and just pottering about re-arranging things until they look just right. And doing the first draft is like having to build the walls!

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

I guess that my first draft writing is always quite slow, so that about 80% of the revising is done while I'm actually writing it (in terms of making sure that I foreshadow things, swapping scenes round and correcting things as I go along.) By the time I come to revise it's just a matter of cosmetic changes which don't take a lot of effort but make a big difference. So I find I get more reward out of less effort in the revision stage.

But I know there are writing guides out there which encourage you to get the first draft done fast, and then disassemble it into separate scenes and cut and re-assemble and re-think etc etc in the revision stage - which does sound like a lot of work to me!

I guess there's no getting away from the work, but your process determines where the work is going to be - whether it's in the first draft or the revisions.

Cor! That was fast I only posted it on Tuesday! Oh, that's good :) I was a bit embarrassed by the paper, which I had to borrow from my daughter - it's got cute little animals on it - but I reckoned if I waited until I bought myself some stationary, it would never get done :)

[mrs-norrington.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I guess it does depend on your process. Mine isn't aided by my cycle of "Do I really want to do this? It's not good." that goes round and round my brain so that it seems to daunting to make the necessary changes.

She didn't say a word about the stationary, so no problems there. ;)

[hms-dauntless.livejournal.com]

because the unwritten story is always so much better than the one you're trying to force into words at the time.
How true ! :)

Yes, it seems that our writing process is very similar (the results are not but that does not surprise me at all ! ;D ).
In addition, I have a peculiar stage of desperation just after finishing the first revision of the first draft, when I re-read the text and realize that there are whole paragraphs needing a total rewriting. The drama is that I have an English text, in front of me, and therefore the new parts scream for being written in English, because the inspiration, the flow of new ideas and images must come from what it's already on the page. This is the moment I most deeply feel how poor and inadequate my knowledge of English is: my writing ideas all come from playing with words, their sound, their nuances, their synonyms and antonyms (sort of a narrative brainstorming), and it's not easy to keep on the inspiration when you have to check every word/ verb/expression on a dictionary. :)

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

I'm in awe that you can manage to write in English at all, let alone being able to hear and worry about the music of the words, even while you're trying to get the meaning down. I couldn't do that! I'm not sure that I can even hear the intonation and rythmn of words in a different language, let alone being able to find ways of manipulating that.

Would it be easier to write the whole thing in Italian and then translate it all at once? Or are there some ideas and concepts which can't even be translated from one language to another?

[hms-dauntless.livejournal.com]

LOL, take into acccount that more often than not I work with *my* idea of how the word or sentence sound in English. And more often than not, my idea has nothing to do with reality. !! :D

But it's a method I cannot change. I like or dislike words on the basis of their sound and when I write I follow an inner rhythm for the sentence.
Which is why 9 times out ot 10 an Italian sentence does not work any more when I translate it.

With Conversation I have a full Italian draft of all chapters. But I do not dare to really work on the text and add the details until I've an English version, because the characters as I know them speak English and must (possibly) think like Englishmen. Should I make them speak Italian on the written page, they would end thinking and *behaving* like Italian persons (and this would
not do, especially for Mr Norrington) ! :D

Moreover, there is the problem of the dialogues. Italian and English are too different for a dialogue to work on translation.
Add to this that I try to give a 18th century flavour to the text and, contrary to the English language, Italian meant as a standardized national language does not really have an actual "18th century style" version. The first true Italian "novel" is the Promessi Sposi, by Manzoni (19th century), and should I burrow the Italian of 18th century plays, my James and Andrew would end tragically declaiming in aulic Latin-Italian, like Alfieri's heroes, exchange arcadic love declarations, like Metastasio's lovers, and chat of their daily life troubles in Venetian, like Goldoni's common people. Very babelic, is not it ? :D

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

It does sound like one of those cryptic crosswords where you have to turn your brain inside out in order to just see what the question means, let alone finding the answer!

I didn't know that there wasn't an RP Italian at the time! That must make writing the historical novel more complicated, because you have to match the language to the setting. But I must admit that I rather like the idea of James and Andrew declaiming their love in Latin stanzas :) I think an RNotC play could be a wonderful thing!

[hms-dauntless.livejournal.com]

LOL, were it only a matter of pronunciation, my life as a ficwriter would be easier. The problem is in 18th century there was no Italian at all, but a huge variety of regional dialects (Piedmontese, Venetian, Tuscan, Neapolitan, Roman, etc etc) so different from each other as English can be from Italian. Aristocratics spoke their regional dialect or French, geeks and clergy spoke Latin, and common people spoke just the dialect of their village. Modern Italian is basically a revised and embellished Tuscan variant as diffused by radio at the beginning of the XX century and, subsequently, TV.

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

It's amazing that they were not understandable at all to each other! Do you get campaigners who want to save the old languages? We've had quite a resurgence of Welsh, Scottish, Irish and Cornish gaelic recently. But some of our dialects still are quite impenetrable too. It's certainly almost as difficult for a speaker of RP to understand a real Geordie or a real Yorkshire dialect as it is to understand a different language - it's just that you hardly ever see them used in writing. But I agree that everything becomes easier when it's written down, in English, because everyone writes in RP.

(I'm thinking about how difficult it is to understand a dialect when it's written down the way it's spoken - Robbie Burns' poetry for example:

"And there's a hand, my trusty fere!
And gie's a hand o' thine!
And we'll tak a right gude-willie waught,
For auld lang syne."

I can't begin to guess at what 'a right gude-willie waught' is :)

[hms-dauntless.livejournal.com]

It's amazing that they were not understandable at all to each other!
LOL, they were ! A Piedmontese and a Neapolitan or a Sicilian person speaking only their dialects could not understand each other more than I could understand a German or a Swedish. Which is among the many reasons Italian unification, in the mid 19th century, was so difficult and troublesome a process.

Yes, there is a great attention towards dialects here, especially in the Northern Italian regions, where there are separatist political parties (like the Lega Nord) who advocate independence from the central Rome government. The Neapolitan dialect, by contrast, owes its fame and survival to artistic reasons, as Neapolitan is the language of many songs of international renown and also of the plays written by a XX century actor and playwriter, Eduardo de Filippo, who's very known and loved in Italy.

LOL, it's a monster of a word ! however, if it can be of any comfort, I'm basically deaf even to the dialect of my own natal town. :D