Recent state of things, scrambled. After a very long time, I am feeling all the romantic feelings, but I can’t fully settle into them, because my writing is… let’s get into it, a mid-February check-in and thought process.
When a woman is found unconscious in a car crash, with luggage containing pieces of human remains, and is taken into the custody of a psychiatric hospital, there she finds her reality and fiction in a tango dance. Isn’t this a mirror held up to my own inner mental state, spiralling down? I want to kill them all, all of the drafts and all the papers around me. I’m struggling with the strategy I used to write this new preliminary draft, which is to write it linearly and scene by scene, from the beginning, just describing it like a journalist or a bad writer. Because every time I zoom into perfecting a scene, I lose touch with the bigger image I’m trying to create. I decided not to get too sensitive about the writing style and imagery and to just go on and draft it, sketch it, without getting too deep into dialogue and voices and character development, to sketch it as feverishly and breathlessly as possible before I forget what the story is about. For such a storyline, I need a better, clearer, more realized path, to have a perspective of the time I need to spend on each chapter. Is there anyone out there to help?
No, no one, but you. Your job is to understand the kind of story being told here, trust it, lean into simplicity, believe that what you want to say is enough, don’t judge it, Sama, just allow it to pour out of you. I need so much stamina every day, who would have thought writing burns so much calorie and brain cell. I need more stamina, more motivation when things are boring and difficult and I’m on the streak of constant problem solving. Sometimes I just want to sketch a scene as fast as possible. I want to be able to be a robot with no feelings and no chronic pain and sit longer and finish one difficult chapter and go on with more exciting scenes, especially knowing that this linear writing will not be definitive and that I have to scramble it up to be the type of storytelling told by a woman on the verge of losing her grip on reality. One of her problems is her disconnection and sense of detachment in her life. She is not immersed enough in life to write from that space. And she is constantly influenced by people, places, emotions, and conversations. She feels like she is on the edge of something great and then she loses it. She fears that if she stops writing she will disappear. So do I.