Writing might make Hemingway bleed, but sometimes it just makes me seethe
As expected (Murphy’s law?), I had to read my overheard dialogue story last night in class. Everyone else managed it in a page or two, but mine meandered on into the double digits. I took so long to get to the dialogue, it was almost clear as crystal I didn’t want it in my story at all.
The professor said it’s perfectly normal to sometimes have issues with prompts. Still, it infuriated me a bit because this rarely happens to me. If I’m given a prompt, at work or for fun, fiction or non, I get it done, and I do it somewhere between decently to well. It absolutely irks me that I got stuck the way I did on this assignment.
Sometimes, my professor said, it makes sense to put something away and return to it after a long break. Which was somewhat funny, because before she told me this, I was convincing myself I just needed to start over and take a different angle on it. Now I feel like I’ve been given permission to drop it for a bit and return later when I’m not so pissed off at it.
It’s hard for me to abandon something I’ve put time into. Do other people have these issues, I wonder?
The night redeemed itself for me in the last 20 minutes of class. We were given the following prompt to work on:
“Where were you last night?”
And lo, I wrote 315 glorious words that made sense and didn’t feel like they sucked. I’m actually quite pleased with it, both for its content and merciful brevity. I feel like it cleansed me.
In other news, I’m going to see the US weekend opening of E.M. Forster’s “Maurice” adapted for the stage this Saturday with my girlfriend and another couple. She read the novel for her Honours English class, so I believe this is an assignment. Curious about the content of the play (as I don’t like going into stage productions completely unaware, for whatever reason), I borrowed a copy of the novel from her.
Post-Victorian England + homosexuality = what appears to be a fabulous read. I’ll report back when I’m more than 30 pages in.
And I also wrote 700 words of my fanfic on the train this morning, which is interesting, because I didn’t have much muse for it. It was almost like I was outright eager though to get away from last night’s assignment and write something I actually enjoyed.
