Day In, Day Out

Hmmm, no more blogging sessions at 2 in the morning. Today I was almost totally useless. I scrapped all but the first two sentences of the three pages I wrote yesterday. At least I did character sketches for Angry Yellow. Anyway, creativity is a violent, painful process, much like birth blah blah blah. OK, now that I got the pseudo-deepness out of the way, this is tough going. At least when I was writing a motion, the law was already set out. It was almost a matter of filling in the blanks (OK, it wasn't as easy as filling in the blanks, you had to make the motion persuasive as well as informative, but at least you had some building blocks). With the novel, I'm starting with almost a blank slate. Hmmmm, maybe a bunch of dots to connect into a coherent picture is a better analogy. I have all these random bits that I do want in the novel, but a novel also has to have momentum and a theme.

Also, today reminded me that writing is an iterative process. When I was drafting the background of the main character, Josh Chang, something in his past, a throw away detail, sounded interesting enough to have a novel in and of itself. Josh started a punk band in college called "The Chinkies" - an all Asian band started as a joke and a protest against the campus Asian student association. They kicked him out because all he could play was the keyboards, and no punk band has keyboards. He wanted to play guitar, but his parents never let him because "guitar" wasn't a serious instrument, it was either piano or violin. Now, the novel was mainly going to be about Josh in his early thirties, dealing with the whole, "Caught between two culture" thing with a "I'm thirty-three and life is passing me by" light though piquant subtheme. But if I make The Chinkies a major part, that's going to require a reworking. Phhht.