I know you've tried this; take a word, one ordinary word. Taxi, say. Then repeat it over and over again. It doesn't take long before it turns into a meaningless sound. Just a pattern of letters, a pattern of vowels and consonants, a symbol that has come unmoored from that emotional immediacy of meaning.
That's sort of how I feel about writing at the moment.
Or perhaps I should say, my writing. Or it might be even more accurate to say, some writing. I'm alternating the latest October Daye book with the first book of the Arkana series. The former is still a success at that prose trick; the words, the letters, the paper are a transparent window to the world contained within.
The latter is, sadly, not succeeding. I'm conscious at every step of the choices the writer is making, from choices of plot to choices of punctuation (and it isn't helping when I disagree with them).
The trees are getting in the way of the forest. Of course in my own work, I planted those trees. In any creative work there's still a lot of boilerplate. Even at the creative heart, the ideas don't appear like Athena, fully armed. They are pulled from the matrix of your experiences. Whether you chose to say you were "inspired by" or you "borrowed from" is up to you (I tend towards the latter, when I'm not going all out and saying I "stole" the idea.)
And, yes, even if there is an intangible inspired pure Idea somewhere at the core, that idea is fleshed out, the clothing and armor it wears constructed, whether in a fluid free-form process of nearly unconscious association or in mechanical construction, engineering with known and tested elements. And the difference between those two extremes is itself in the eye of the beholder; what seems mechanistic to me might seem a creative insight to an outside observer.
But that is probably beside the point.
What's bothering me now is that greater bulk that holds no pretension to coming directly from the muses, unsoiled by the ordinary world. What is bugging me now is all that boilerplate. All the naked mechanics of chunk of exposition here, chunk of dialog here. Of the necessary interleaving of speakers, of the cadence of sentences, of the rounding of every paragraph around a single idea -- all the way out to the basic story which is almost always there, regardless of the theme, the genre, the word it is set in.
Create a character. Set him in motion after a goal. Have his journey go through a place. At some point you are reaching into the box to assemble the building blocks and it hits you like mjolnir how few are the Seven Basic Plots, or how many the Greeks had -- whichever list you have, it is too few. And how much the creation of your characters starts to resemble those children's flip books where you mix-and-match head, torso and feet to make your own hybrid creature.
Yes, it is easy to make fun of the form. Easier still if you are trying to satirize a genre; generic fantasy; "A new evil has arisen. The black-flame steeds of the Dark Lord of H'gar thunder across the once-peaceful lands. All that stands in their way are a young bard, a willful princess, a failed alchemist and a thief. All will be lost unless they can recover...the Chalice of the Snow."
When you stand this far back, sure, everything blurs together. All urban fantasies are grey in the night-time. All stories were already told before Aristophanes had even started. And it feels so futile and so silly to worry about the details of yet another one.
So there has to be something in the particulars that makes it matter. We are in our hindbrains social primates with millions of years of watching each nuance of expression and body language to tell us who is angry and needs to be pacified, who found food and needs to be followed, who is receptive and should be befriended. Most of our media is endlessly playing pictures of these naked apes so we can watch others of our kind live and react and emote, and so we can learn and affirm from them what it is to be human.
It isn't a boy that meets a girl. It is this boy, this unique individual, this single happenstance of genetic chance and unique upbringing, that meets another happenstance of genetic chance and upbringing to struggle to bridge a just a little that unbridgeable gap between every unique I. The details matter. Every word choice matters, every cadence in the dialog matters.
If it is boring, it probably means that I'm not doing it right.
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