A Fire Of Reason
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Sep
14
2006

I Give Up

To my characters: I give up. You’re officially on your own. You want to write the damn book? Go ahead. I’m merely chronicling your exploits and worrying about little things like plot, structure and good writing. I refuse to also be responsible for your mental state, and I refuse to put up with any more abuse. Go find another poor writer to harass. I’m taking the day off.

I declare this a day of Freedom From Character Whispers. I am going to watch Marx Brothers movies and eat whatever I please and take my kids to the park. I’m going to make lunch for our adoptive son and hit the treadmill with my IPod turned on high. I’m also going to go knit and watch Carnivale with Jan tonight. I will not touch my keyboard. I will not wank over plot or listen to the voices in my head. I especially will not agonize over the damaged characters who want Kleenex and bonbons before they condescend to tell me what happens next in the book I’m doing all the work of writing.

I am also going to go and look at pictures of Takeshi Kaneshiro until my eyes feed my brain enough pretty to overload. (Thanks for the idea, Bam!) You want someone to type your angst? Go find someone else. I’m not listening today.

By tomorrow I hope you’ll have come back to our real job together, which is telling the damn story and not throwing red herrings across the path. By tomorrow I expect you to come back fresh and ready to work, and I expect to knock out a respectable few thousand words instead of a drabble of two hundred that you subjected me to yesterday, every one pulled forth from my brain like a too-big baby from the pelvis of a field mouse.

So. Characters, DISMISSED! Go get some R & R, and we’ll come back fresh tomorrow.

And if you don’t, I’m going to do something drastic.

Don’t test me on this one.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 11:48 am and is filed under Rant Rant Rave, Real Life, Writing (About). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “I Give Up”

  1. Jane Says:
    September 14th, 2006 at 8:43 pm

    Dear Lilith,

    That’s right. No reward for bad behavior! Bad characters, bad, bad! You really do need a break from them while they have that time-out. On the other hand Takeshi Kaneshiro is very very pretty and should at least take one turn on the catwalk of your imagination.