You've got this couch, dark velvety purple. Maybe it's tufted or just a big oversized purple couch, but you love it. It's not easy to work with a purple couch, but you congratulate yourself on being willing to take a risk. You buy orange pillows to go with it.
Then one day, something shifts. You turn on a light or your flip the blinds a certain way and it hits you -the couch is actually brown.
You are not a purple couch person. You are a brown couch person. The orange pillows are fine, but still, now everything is different. Had you known you had a brown couch, you might have taken other risks. You might have, for example, picked up some hot pink pillows to go with it.
With the writing, it happens when I look back on a completed draft. For a little while, purple, but then later brown. Brown-brown. And then butt ugly brown. This has been really freaking me out.
But I wonder if the trick in a revision is to keep trying to write the purple back in? To try to get back to the delusional state, but in a new way, until the couch stays purple or the draft feels complete.
I have this thing about honesty, yet with writing a certain level of self-deception must be cultivated. If this were just about life, I'd say face the brown! Embrace it!
But this isn't about life. This is about fiction.
1 comment:
Purple couch... brown couch... what does your Heartbrain tell you? The Hearbrain always sees it for what it is.
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