Sisyphus and the hippopotamus

[truepenny]

Those 1,017 words yesterday? Wrong. All of them.

So I start again. Bottom of the hill, put my shoulder to the ass of a dischuffed hippopotamus (in the immortal phrasing of ajhalluk), and start shoving.

I don't know if anybody else works this way, but it's certainly not a new phenomenon for me. I have two or three "false starts" for various novels lying around my hard-drive that amount to half a book each. Sometimes it takes me a really long time to realize I'm pushing the wrong hippopotamus up the wrong damn hill.

When I start with a story, I get a thing in my head. It's not a story, not exactly, more like a constellation of characters and plot ideas and an emotional watershed or two. And figuring out how to translate that into a story is ... difficult. I've tried starting by writing the emotional watersheds (before anyone suggests it), but then I have no incentive to go back and figure out how the characters got there, and we get stuck in a sort of limbo state between vignette and story and the hippopotamus sinks into the mud with a Gotcha! sort of look in its eye.

So I try to figure out where the beginning is, and start. Sometimes (to switch metaphors), I end up like Toby in The Sign of Four following a barrel of creosote instead of a murderer. So stop, go back, try again. Cast in another circle, find a different scent, give chase. Maybe this time I find the murderer; maybe I discover I've been chasing a ship-builder. (The hippopotamus sniggers nastily.) But that's what the process looks like: trying to find the singular scent among a bewildering plethora that will lead me to my quarry.

And all the while trying not to stall long enough for the hippopotamus to sit down.

I must be crazy. Because this is still the best damn job in the world.

Comments

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Oh, don't feel bad. I've got fifty page false starts sitting in my hard drive.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

What happens with me is that I keep futzing around trying to figure out who is telling me the story.

Once I know that, I can generally push the hippopotamous, though quite often I find that suddenly the hippo has slid in quite a wrong direction and I need to cut out large chunks and and change the direction of the road so that the hippo is now going in the right direction.

[lisekit.livejournal.com]

Not only does that resonate with the method for my current thesis, but the thesis itself refers to entire false starts for th enovel genre in India. Fact.

[franzeska]

I really think you need an icon with a self-satisfied looking hippo on it.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I decided you were right.