It’s been a while.
How’s it all going? Well, I had an attack of the doubts over the past few days. Before that I had been procrastinating. I had been a bit overwhelmed by the whole thing and was staying away from writing for uni. I submitted TMA05 on April 4th and got my mark on April 7th. I have to be very careful about what I discuss, having gone over the OU’s rules on discussing things about assignments online.
Suffice it to say it was a pass and I was happy with the result.
I took an early Easter break and had planned to get back to study from Tuesday, 11 April but…that didn’t really happen. I went through a period of demotivation and took all of that week (which was officially Spring Break anyway) off. I was doubting my ability to be “commander of my own ship” in terms of independent study. I feel a little out on a limb when it comes to that. I feel I have a good sense of what my strengths are with my writing but I’m finding it hard to know what to do about my weaknesses. I grapple with really understanding the concepts and techniques around narrative voice and point of view. I know that I also need to get better at creating settings. Creating dialogue for me is VERY strong. I can have characters waffle on all day long – but then to explain where they are and what surrounds them? That’s the hard part. And the other hard part for me is the voice itself. Are they giving a monologue? Is it internal? Is it a soliloquy? Is it solely from their perspective or is it coming from them being observed by someone else? And is that narrator part of the story or not?
I know all this will come with time and through experience but I want it now! Lol.
In my dilemma, I completely wrote off the story I had been working on (and a lot “off”) for the past 4 weeks. I started to believe it was just too big! There was too much going on with it and there was no way I was going to contain it within 2000 words! So, yesterday I started something else. I began a completely fresh story based on this little niggling idea I had about a story that I wanted to explore stemming from the lyrics of a Simple Minds song – Special View. It flowed and I have around 1500 words of a story in no time at all. I spent a small amount of time researching – but it was nothing compared to the research I’ve done so far for the first story. So, it flowed and all that’s left is to end it. I don’t know what that ending will be, yet. If indeed I keep it as a back up and extend it to 2000 words.
At the moment I think the story based on Special View might be something I work on in conjunction with the assignment story just as a kind of distraction for when/if I get stuck. Assignment story now feels fully back on track. I did a lot of work with it today. I didn’t add that much writing to it. Maybe only about 500 words today. I guess it just didn’t feel like much because it all flowed so much better today. But considering it was sitting at around 900 words when I came back to the story on Monday, then…that’s pretty bloody good! Assignment story now sits at 1500 words also. I just need to write the end for it. But I have the ending formulated, I just need to write it out.
It’s coming along nicely. There are exactly 4 weeks left until submission date (18 May) and after a few days of feeling not so good about it, today I feel much better.
