The trouble with writing.

I haven’t updated in ages. Mostly, I haven’t felt like I’ve had much to say. Or I’ve said it on Twitter, or Livejournal. Mostly Twitter. I feel like there’s an interesting balance between all these social media sites and the way I use them. Twitter is for moment to moment venting so I have a way of confirming what I did, what I’m doing, and what I will do, as well as how I happen to feel about any given issue from moment to moment. Lately, my use of LJ has been limited to the personal yet trivial. There were months, maybe years, where everything went into my LJ without a thought in the world. For various reasons, I just don’t want to spill it all there like I used to. So I use my LJ for things like little reviews and summaries of the bigger events in my life.

But the act of blogging seems a little more serious. I always want my blogs to be somewhere between personal and editorial, so they fit into the space occupied by “shit people would actually want to read about”. Which I think is a pretty good goal for blogging.

Back to the titular subject: writing troubles.

For quite a while now, I’ve been stuck in some sort of loop regarding my goals as a writer. The main question, for a long time, was whether I wanted to focus on collaborative writing or put that aside for solitary work – and if I did do that, how would I go about it? I hate disappointing people, but I know that my inattention and frustration with collaborative writing is frustrating as it is. So I’ve come to a temporary solution of mentally extricating certain characters from their collaborative settings and putting them in frames that are entirely my own. If I still happen to want to use them for RP, I can. If I want to use them for fiction, I can do so in freedom.

But now that I have that degree of flexibility, I’m having issues that require a lot more grit to work through. There are currently two novels (or perhaps novellas) that I’d like to write. One project is thematic, speculative, conceptual, and very organized. It has been consistently progressing since I conceived of it, and so far I’m pleased.

The other is this tangled nest of characters that have unwittingly become refugees, each from someplace different. When writing collaboratively, I try to give my characters plenty of distance from one another, so very few of these people are linked. I really would like to put them all into a cohesive work of fiction, but how do I decide things like central character (if any)? Plot (if any)? Overarching theme (this is the minimum necessary in my eyes)?

I really don’t know yet, and it worries me to think that I have all these psychologically beautiful little creations with no use to them. Hopefully that won’t be the case.

And of course, there’s the constant issue of style. Some days I love my style of writing, some days I hate it. Most days of late I think of it as something that can’t immediately be helped – like shitty plumbing or a summer that goes on too long. It’s definitely at an awkward point, but what can I do aside from stand back and let it grow? Keep writing. That’s about it.