Onions & Ogres

Yup. Layers. Changing your way of thinking and looking at the world isn’t easy and it doesn’t shift overnight. Repeatedly banging your head against the same walls can help. Wait, I mean repeatedly exposing yourself to the same ideas in different venues, formats and states of mind. I decided to subject you to some snippets from my journal this week. The self-doubt isn’t as high today, honest.

Layers, must add more layers.

I need to think in layers and realize they’re a good and natural process. Nothing is wrong with getting the action down on the page and going back to add in what they’re thinking or experiencing. I do this with dialogue all the time. I need to expand the way I think to include other layers. An onion, or even an ogre, doesn’t have one or two layers. I need to dig deeper and add more little touches everywhere.

I don’t have a slick, clean, sparse voice like Janet Evanovich or Robert Parker. I can live with this. However, I need to be able to take my bland and boring basic sentences without any punch to them and ratchet them up to the next level.

Maybe I possess no real talent for this, or else I’m just doubting myself and questioning the effort to get through this phase. Perhaps I’m biased because I’ve seen DH and others make the art look so effortless. Painters don’t sit down and produce masterpieces. Layers and layers of paint are applied to reach the final image. Sculptors also work with layers. The armature is their rough draft. The form has to be built upon to reach the final stages.

Writing is no different. I need to get past this gestural phrase. Because honestly, that’s all it is. I’m making rough sketches toward what I want the final story to become. Some of my strokes are more confident and better delineate what I’m going for, but they’re still only rough guidelines of where I need to apply more effort later.

I think this is what’s most frustrating. I like seeing things done. Either that or I like to fiddle and play with them forever. However, none of my fiddling has amounted to a significant change. Nothing seems to change the existing functionality of previous versions.

I could be just fooling myself into thinking I can do this. Then again, I should question whether I do give my all or if I coast along, drifting and not pushing myself. That’s always a possibility. I’m wishy-washy on what my actual goals are and why I want to do this. I don’t have the drive to publish I see in other Divas. I don’t know if that’s a fear of success or laziness and lack of focus and ambition.

I don’t like to think I have no drive, no passion, no desire to make something of myself. I hate how I don’t mind shuffling along and ignoring how the world passes me by some days. I feel like I should do something, be someone, but most days, I’m not sure how to do that.

I’ve always been “adequate enough” at everything I attempt. I’d say the text game I worked on for a decade was probably one of the few places where I strove to do things better all the time. I don’t know if others would agree, because I did a hell of a lot of coasting too, but for a while, I was dedicated to bringing a deeper and better experience to the players in the areas I built and maintained.

I suspect that’s part of my problem with writing. I get the equivalent of the rooms and mobs done and think I have accomplished something. Either no ACTS exist to animate them or if there are, they’re sketchy and inconsistent. All of Janet Evanovich’s characters possess the equivalent of full libraries of ACTS behind them. Her settings are rich with revisited details. They’re familiar (some even say repetitive), but also resonant.

It’s likely I’m too close to what I’ve written still, but damn, I have trouble seeing where and how to improve what’s already on the page. I find it very difficult if the improvements require cutting something out. To my mind, that aspect is the most foreign.