Writing sex scenes can lead to temporal displacement.

[uberreiniger]

There is an episode of the show Futurama where the hero, Fry, and his friends have to film a new episode of a television show cancelled centuries ago to appease an alien overlord who is invading Earth. They start broadcasting it live only to discover they only have a few seconds' worth of dialogue. Fry explains that "It took me an hour to write. I thought it would take an hour to say."

It's funny because it's true. The act of writing alters your perception of time in truly mindfucking ways. If you're not a writer there really isn't a way to convey the bewilderment and disorientation that comes with looking at the clock and realizing you have been laboring for an hour only to have six sentences staring back at you. They might not even be sentences you want to keep, at that.

I started writing almost the minute I woke up this morning. And the chronological disconnect actually wasn't that drastic. I got an entire page of handwritten, single-spaced material cranked out in an hour and a half and I was happy with every jot and tittle of it. That's rare for me. But still, it felt like I should have no fewer than ten leaves, their every centimeter covered in ink, staring back at me. I know a lot of people who read what I say here are writers and I'm curious if you notice this phenomenon as much as I do. Is it a source of frustration in your work or just something you accept or don't think about that much?

If Monty Python's Graham Chapman were alive and wearing a British army uniform he would say. "This started out as a nice gothic story about a priestess going off to stay in a foreign castle where there's queer goings-on afoot and now it's just gotten SILLY!" Well, actually it hasn't gotten silly and I guess that's kind of the problem. The story has branched out in directions I hadn't expected, much as the original Apocalypse Woman did and it has required readjustment of my original goals. For one thing, the story was originally supposed to be one big, giant case of break the cutie. Don't get me wrong, that's still there. But now I have way WAY more plot threads wriggling around besides "How much hell can I put this woman through?" This is why I don't outline my stories before I write them. My stories always seem to grow until they burst they container I initially put them in.

I should stop talking before I get spoilery or ruin the mystery for future readers. Of course, by the time this story finally sees the light of day - which could be a year or more from now - it may have turned into something else entirely again and everything I've said here will be moot. In which case the joke will be on you. But I promise I will make being the brunt of said joke worth your while :)

Comments

[ravenbrenna.livejournal.com]

I know exactly what you mean! It's worse at work when I get interuptions or people start talking to me, but I'll work all night, thinking really hard, occasionally stopping to research, and get maybe half a page worth of writing done by the end of my shift and I'm just like wtf??

Even when I am writing roleplays with people I can sometimes just not know where to take my next reply and can sit around for nearly an hour trying to sort out my thoughts before I finally write that paragraph.

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

Isn't it the damnedest thing? That's me right there, too: tons of researching and thinking for hours on end and BOOM, half a page.

These last two days I've been very productive and gotten a page and a half both days. But I don't expect that to last.

Roleplays are very thought-intensive so no need to feel bad about wanting to get those replies just right. Thinking that stuff out is a big part of the fun, I think.

[ravenbrenna.livejournal.com]

I managed to get a page today and I was very excited about this! lol. How long has it taken you to write a full book in the past? Because I've been working on this fic for a long while and i'm only at 14 pages in word and that makes me go omg so long lol.

Roleplay goes much faster than writing i find because you only have to worry about half of the characters and you have the second person to push it along lol

[cherith.livejournal.com]

Depends on the story for me, I think. Sometimes I'll type for hours and be happily surprised by how much I've written (rare). And other times I feel like I do more staring at the blank screen than actual typing and it feels like fighting for every word.

[germsama.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I definitely know what you mean.

It screws with my sense of pace way too much. I'll finish a scene or a chapter feeling like I wrote something nice and meaty, only to find that my friendly exchange between two characters reads like it's fucking Kill Bill or something.

The structure of House of Leaves defines pretty much exactly how the writing feels in my head, from the passages bouncing from page to page to the sentences that demand the space of an entire page.

[uberreiniger.livejournal.com]

Haha! Well House of Leaves is, according to common interpretation, a metafictional treatise on how we interact with the written word anyway so it's not inappropriate that its structure reflects the way stories assemble themselves in the mind.