Brain Dead
I think it was the hours in the Denver airport that fried my brain. I am ordinarily a pretty easy-going traveler. And I might have been in Denver had I thought that anything the airline did there made sense.
I have no trouble with waiting for hours due to acts of God, no problems with mechanical repairs, complete understanding of the need for crews to sleep. I will wait patiently for hours and hours through endless security checks. I was, after all, scheduled to fly out of New York City on 9-11. I consider that I have already dodged a very big bullet.
So I am tolerant in general when it comes to airline delays. But when I think they could have been avoided with a little forethought, I lose patience. So I fumed silently (or not so silently) for hours, and as a result, I am brain dead.
It has taken me three days to get the suitcases unpacked and the laundry done. I have gone back over chunks of Spence and Sadie and my mind has glazed over. My eyes have rolled back in my head. And all I can do is think about pithy things I would like to say to the president of a certain airline. I can not seem to think about chapter nine.
I need to think about chapter nine. I actually need to think about chapter ten. Well, in fact I have thought about both, but so far the lead-in sentence has eluded me. Once the sentence appears (when I am no longer brain dead) I will progress.
Anne Frasier, on her blog, writes about getting to the heart of a scene and how sometimes when she is having problems, it is due to not being able to focus on what is the essence of what needs to be accomplished therein. I understand and agree with what she said. But sometimes (particularly the brain dead times) it is finding the right line to open a scene that makes all the difference.
For example, I know precisely what is going to happen in the next scene. I know what is at its heart. But I do not know how to start it. And so I stare at the page. I write around it, I circle it, I fumble, I mutter. And I still do not have the right words. At nearly 1 in the morning, I suspect the words may not come right now. So I am going to bed -- committing the heart of the scene to memory and asking my sub-conscious, where there may yet be a living cell or two, to get busy and come up with a line. Please!
In the meantime, I have discovered that my printer does a dynamite job on wedding photos -- and that I can not (as opposed to the contraction of those two words) use the apostrophe key on my computer. It has apparently quit for the night. Which means that it is definitely time to pack it in and go to bed!
I have no trouble with waiting for hours due to acts of God, no problems with mechanical repairs, complete understanding of the need for crews to sleep. I will wait patiently for hours and hours through endless security checks. I was, after all, scheduled to fly out of New York City on 9-11. I consider that I have already dodged a very big bullet.
So I am tolerant in general when it comes to airline delays. But when I think they could have been avoided with a little forethought, I lose patience. So I fumed silently (or not so silently) for hours, and as a result, I am brain dead.
It has taken me three days to get the suitcases unpacked and the laundry done. I have gone back over chunks of Spence and Sadie and my mind has glazed over. My eyes have rolled back in my head. And all I can do is think about pithy things I would like to say to the president of a certain airline. I can not seem to think about chapter nine.
I need to think about chapter nine. I actually need to think about chapter ten. Well, in fact I have thought about both, but so far the lead-in sentence has eluded me. Once the sentence appears (when I am no longer brain dead) I will progress.
Anne Frasier, on her blog, writes about getting to the heart of a scene and how sometimes when she is having problems, it is due to not being able to focus on what is the essence of what needs to be accomplished therein. I understand and agree with what she said. But sometimes (particularly the brain dead times) it is finding the right line to open a scene that makes all the difference.
For example, I know precisely what is going to happen in the next scene. I know what is at its heart. But I do not know how to start it. And so I stare at the page. I write around it, I circle it, I fumble, I mutter. And I still do not have the right words. At nearly 1 in the morning, I suspect the words may not come right now. So I am going to bed -- committing the heart of the scene to memory and asking my sub-conscious, where there may yet be a living cell or two, to get busy and come up with a line. Please!
In the meantime, I have discovered that my printer does a dynamite job on wedding photos -- and that I can not (as opposed to the contraction of those two words) use the apostrophe key on my computer. It has apparently quit for the night. Which means that it is definitely time to pack it in and go to bed!
posted by Anne McAllister at 11:42 PM
2 Comments:
oh, wow. do i ever know what you're talking about. i thought i was the only one who had the problem of the first line or for me sometimes the first paragraph. that's probably one of the things i struggle with the most!! i know what the scene is about, what's going to happen, even dialogue. but starting it? arggghhh!
those are the areas of a ms i probably revise the most. it really has nothing to do with the story and is really more technical.
Exactly, Anne. And I think it only gets worse. I can remember feeling far more creative in my earliest books. Why? Heaven knows. But it gets harder to find fresh ways to do things. And, you're right, it is technical (and speaking of technical, I'm happy to see that my apostrophe has come back off strike and is working again today. Nothing like a lack of an apostrophe to change the way a person phrases things!).
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