Tag Archives: ethelinda rambles

Brain at Work

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I’m grateful that the “step away from it for awhile” tactic works as a method for getting over tiredness or writer’s block for me. It has always felt to me as though I say to my brain, “Okay, just run this in the background for awhile, and let’s see what the results are later,” and then I can stop focusing consciously on whatever scene or section is giving me trouble. And my brain does that, it lets the ideas brew subconsciously, and I’ve found that often even just a day later, I suddenly feel much more like I know what I need to write, or like the words are coming to me again. Sometimes it takes longer than a day, of course, but it always works eventually.

Which is probably just a lot of rambling to say: Brains are cool. 🙂

I do think it helps me as a motivational tool as well, though. To not think about it as “I have writer’s block” or “I’m stuck on this scene,” but rather, “My brain just needs some time to work on this subconsciously,” or “Need to let this scene percolate for a bit.” It sounds much less daunting that way, much less negative, which in turn makes motivating myself to try again a day or two later much easier.

For other writers: do you have an experience like this? Or do you deal with feeling stuck in other ways? I’m curious to know how other people think about this issue.

Now, probably time to stop rambling (and mixing my computer and coffee metaphors).

~Ethelinda

Progress!

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I was getting close and wanted to break 45,000 words for The Wizard of Suomen tonight. I actually made it to just over 46,000 words. It feels really good to be making such progress on this draft! 😀

Using a blog as motivation for working on this story more consistently has been an interesting process. It’s clearly helping, even though I’ve only been doing it for a short while. My life is somewhat uncertain and unsettled in a lot of ways right now (some good, some not so good), and in the past I’ve found it difficult to work on my fiction in those circumstances. It feels very good to be able to work on this story consistently despite that uncertainty, though, so I’m glad that this seems to be working as a motivational tool. Concrete goals and progress are definitely helpful.

~Ethelinda

Backstory

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I have for some time been writing a more extensive backstory for one of the characters in The Wizard of Suomen, partly because I like the character and partly because it helps to flesh out some things about several characters and the world itself that I’m not sure will fit well into the main story. Snippets of this backstory will be in the main story at a certain point as flashbacks, but there will definitely be a lot more than that, and I am planning on posting the whole thing at some point after the main story is finished. Working on part of it tonight, I wrote almost 2000 words in just an hour, none of which will show up in the main story at all, so it seems that my muses are definitely interested. 🙂 (I’m using this backstory as a way to make sure I have a really good grasp of the character in question, since in the main story I’m working on a section where this character’s motivations and actions are central, and I want to be sure they fit and make sense. Hence, I’m writing some things that won’t be posted until I put up this backstory as a whole after the main story.)

This is definitely another balancing area for a writer (something I have noticed as a reader of fiction), the issue of what to include to make a new world intelligible and interesting for readers, without overwhelming them with facts that they won’t remember and don’t need to care about. I hope I’m striking that balance so far, introducing new information as it’s needed, but not so much at a time that it’s overwhelming or hard to remember. This is another reason that I wanted to have a website, actually; in addition to posting and getting feedback on the story itself, this website will give me a place to eventually post this backstory, plus other notes and background information that I have made as I do world-building, but that might not fit neatly into the story itself. Hopefully some readers will enjoy those things as well!

~Ethelinda

Review: Gettysburg

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I just finished watching Gettysburg the other day, and it was both inspiring and sobering.

It’s one of the Civil War battles that I think we hear the most about superficially, but I realized in watching the movie that I really didn’t know any of the details of what happened over the course of those few days and why. The casualties on both sides totaled 53,000 men, making it the bloodiest battle ever fought on American soil. But that number is even more sobering when you realize that if General Lee had actually paid attention to good strategy, the battle would never have happened at all. The Confederate Army was in a perfect position to turn and head towards Washington D.C., which would have forced the Union Army to follow, and would have given the Confederates time to find good, high ground to dig into and meet the Union forces from a stronger position. Instead, Lee decided that since they had already had a run-in with the Union forces at Gettysburg, it would be “cowardly” and “weaken the morale” of his men to turn and leave at that point. There was more “glory” and “honor” to be found in fighting from a weaker, downhill position…and on top of that, refusing to listen to the advice of his other generals (especially James Longstreet) to attack the sides and flanks of the Union forces, but instead sending 15,000 men directly up a wide, open slope against the center of the Union lines, where they could be slaughtered en masse by Union artillery fire.

There was a great deal of courage and bravery as well, and some very good leadership and decisions by some of the Union officers, but the staggering loss of life, and the sickening lack of necessity for it, is the thing that has really stuck with me. Writing a story about a war as I am, it’s an interesting topic, and I’m glad that I watched the movie. It helps to keep me aware, as a writer, about how the ideas and beliefs of leaders in a conflict have direct, life-or-death consequences for the people who must follow their orders. 53,000 is not just a number – it means that 53,000 individual, living, breathing human beings died at Gettysburg. I think that, in writing about war, that is the sort of thing that it is very good to keep in mind.

To go back to the movie itself, it is long (a bit more than 4 hours), but it is well done and I would definitely recommend it. A lot of Civil War reenactors were brought in for the battle scenes, which seemed realistic to me, and I liked the acting of all the major characters as well; one gets a good sense of their personalities. It is based on The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, which is a fictional but (as I understand it) historically accurate account of the Battle of Gettysburg.

~Ethelinda

Progress!

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Wrote another 1100 or so words of The Wizard of Suomen today. It always feels really good to make progress on a story, even if it’s not a huge amount. 😀

I’ll put up chapter 2 on Friday, and hopefully will update this one weekly. I might start posting a couple of other things as well, though updates on those are likely to be much more sporadic, at least for the time being.

The requisite first post

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I will hopefully start posting some actual fiction within the next week or two, but there’s a bit more tweaking of the site and the stories to be done first. (Does anyone else have trouble coming up even with working titles for fiction? My experience has been that I either start out with a title that I absolutely want to use, or it’s very difficult to think of anything.)

~Ethelinda