Cringey
Who are these people?
I spent time with an unbearably fake couple this week. He was handsy with her. She acted like she liked it when I didn’t think she did. Anyone paying attention would know this behavior didn’t fit with this couple’s history.
But the person who had not been paying attention was me because I wrote it.
Last Saturday morning I did manage to break away and write for the extended time I wondered might be possible when I last spoke to you here. It seemed half fluff of me to propose I could spend time like this once per week, but two weeks in a row can start a streak so maybe I can keep it going for the summer.
This time it was a 45-minute writing session instead of 90, but it was my choice to bail at the halfway mark. When I read through an old chapter to the place where these phoney bologna characters appeared, I needed to pause and work out what happened. Whatever assumptions I had about these characters whenever I last touched this chapter had clearly changed. And I could have written the words months or even years ago. I’ve been chipping away at this so long I have no way of knowing.
Cringing at how off this couple’s interaction was provided a useful benchmark. The feeling made it clear that I’ve already done a lot of work on who these people need to be, even if it’s not all captured on the page yet. Tellingly, I’d forgotten about them in my dialogue homework. They are in there now.
So I got back to work on them in the bits of time I write on my commute and I’m satisfied that I’ve changed them enough that I can continue moving through the chapter, knowing I will have to come back to them later.
There was a time when these two weirdos would have completely derailed my progress. I would have dropped everything to perfect them — perfection being the enemy of progress, of course. I am grateful this triage approach is working, helping me pay attention to other things that are more valuable right now.
With value in mind, I started this newsletter with a challenge to myself to write a little bit each day, mostly to trick myself into writing at all. This has largely turned into a routine of short bursts of writing 3-4 days a week. Just south of 200 weeks later, I’m confident I will keep the pace, but see how much more valuable the whole thing would be by regularly lengthening one of the reps. I don’t want to commit to doing it forever because it feels too impossible to imagine that being realistic at this moment in my life, but I will try for a third week in a row.
Happy 4th!
Week 177: Get your hands off of her
Some everyday: No
Words: A bunch but I didn’t count, again!
See you next week.