I’ve had a less than stellar weekend, so this has gone far towards ending it on a better note.
Total word count, Il Maestro e le Figlie di Coro: 19,116
Total words today: 3,060
I wrote a thousand this afternoon before heading out to my in-laws’ for dinner (an outing that Liam cut short), and evidently I just wrote another two thousand after he went to bed. I went back and filled in one of the [bridge] sections that needed to be written, but for which I had no plan last week. Time is good thing; it allows ideas to circulate in the subconscious, to emerge when ready. I do something very similar when I write non-fic: if I stall on one section, I move on and pick another section to write, marking where I left off with a vague note as to what ought to go there when I’m in the correct headspace and/or have a clearer idea of what to say, and how to say it.
It’s a good thing that I’m writing historical fiction, and can’t deviate from what I know happened. Otherwise my male protagonist and that young charming sympathetic female character who insinuated herself into the story would be falling in love, because it would be incredibly easy to do the way this story is going. It would be dreadfully cliched, and the temptation to succumb to it would be fierce. Fortunately the scandal is avoided by the simple fact that history demonstrates that nothing of the kind occurred, leaving the novella thankfully unmarked by indignity.
Psssh, history. What do historians know, anyway?! Whole lotta nuthin’ if you ask me. Write! Create! Love knows no bounds!
You know, something similar happened in my zombie novel. The characters were gearing themselves up as love interests (two of them), but suddenly they’ve been distracted by shiny things and neither of them has so much as spent more than five minutes in the same room with the other.
*shakes head*
Characters. Go figure.
Anyway, I’m glad that they’re complying with the Rules of History for you. :) I am awed by your production on this latest endeavour.
Noooo, Tal! History here is a Good Thing, keeping the novella from falling into hackneyed cliche! I cling to history; it is my defense!
And thanks, Daphne. At the risk of sounding arrogant, if there’s one thing I’m good at, no matter if the project is fic or non-fic, it’s producing word count hard and fast. What I’m not as good at while writing on the fly like this is resolving the narrative. This has a lot to do with how I work out a story, though, particularly when I write without an outline. But that’s okay; this is writing for myself, and I find writing to discover/work out the story fun. It can be unbroken later, once it exists in some form.
History is fiction.
Written by dead white men for the glorification of other dead white men.
Then rewritten by angry white women and angrier ethnic peoples of both genders to show what a bunch of bastards those nasty dead white men were.
There is no truth in history. There are no Rules of History.
It’s all made up.
Agreed. Plus, what we make up shifts when we step two feeet to the right of left. Historical parallax.
So can we say that the History I am clinging to, which consists of receipts for sales of instruments, pay stubs, publication years for certain pieces of music, and registration lists, at least gives me a framework upon which we hang our version of the Truth?