“and if i should die
god forbid that i
pass away with ideas left in limbo
in creative purgatory”
Brian Vander Ark

author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

actually writing blog

maybe it's trying to tell me something
Wed 2014-06-04 23:41:28 (in context)
  • 4,064 words (if poetry, lines) long

I have no critters to report on today. Oh, well, there was a bee in the house--clearly, the bees are still getting in; they have not been replaced with bats in the style of traditional cumulative narratives, e.g. "I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly." Alas, for bats are way cooler to encounter up close, and, rabies notwithstanding, far less scary. They don't have stingers. Barbed stingers that keep actively pumping venom into you after being detached from the dying bee. And randomly finding dead bees around the house? Not much better! I suffer from a low-grade constant background-noise-level fear that I will step barefoot on a bee that got into the house and died. I seriously got stung that way once. This was back when we lived in Oregon, more than a decade ago. The memory remains fresh.

That said, it's probably the bat (and attendant rabies concerns) that will get our homeowners' association management to take seriously my complaints that the roof isn't critter-tight. Bats are a Big Deal, while bees are seen as just a fact of life--despite the fact that more people die or require emergency care from bee stings in a year (thanks to allergies which John and I fortunately do not have) than have been known to contract rabies in the past twenty.

I have this to report: The story persists in not being easy. Remember how I said I was just going to have to slap some awful dialog on the page and see where it takes me? It is horrible dialog. It's cringingly bad. It makes me not want to look at it ever again. It makes me question myself: if I'm having such a hard time having a character believably say certain things and want to do other certain things, is it possible that maybe the plot I've come up with is just stupid? Generally I get good results when I trust my dreams and turn them into stories, but maybe I'm being too faithful in this case?

There's nothing for it but to keep splatting words on the page. As an act of faith, if need be. And to resist the temptation to go haring off after the latest story idea that showed up, accompanied by electricity! and excitement! and NRE!, in my daily freewriting exercises.

I always knew it was hard, this writing gig. But why does it have to be painful?

Argh.

email