Usually I am racing for the end of a course. Usually there is a whispering in my head "on to the next, on to the next!". This time, however I am stalling and not for the usual reasons of life's distractions, fatigue or a drying up of momentum. I am simply at the end of the course, the final course, in my path and, although this is what I have been working towards - the completion of a degree in something I love doing - I am a little sad...and scared.
A friend told me recently when I said I was about to submit my penultimate assignment of my final course "Wow! It seems only yesterday that you were starting it!" But it wasn't yesterday...it was a while ago when I was talked into writing a letter to the OCA asking for details and clarification and wondering about doing "just one course, just to see whether I can do it...if it's for me" and secretly being scared to death and wishing for just one chance to have a go!
So I stalled. I had written all four chapters of the assignments in one go and then stopped - thinking that to leave the fifth chapter, the fifth assignment, open would be allowing me to be flexible with how I wanted the narrative to end (as far as the course is concerned). But now I wonder if that was actually true, I think I may have been a bit scared about the end of the creative element....the final creative part of the long path -seven courses!
I gave myself a talking to and decided to do exactly what I intended - so, I sat down and began being flexible with the writing of the fifth chapter. I plunged into the post fourth chapter, the main character is waking in the mud of a water meadow having been apparently hit by lightning (along with his friend) and is surrounded by people who are helping him (in their way) and one other.....not a friend.
I was there! Back where I wanted to be, running around in my own little world, seeing it, feeling it and, god(s) help me, smelling it! (I knew that rancid bog on the edge of that wood, waterlogged and fetid all year round, would come in handy one day - I can still smell my socks after getting my boot stuck and stepping out unintentionally).
The first part splashed onto the page and I could see it all....
...the next part was tricky but again I walked around picking out what to show and how to phrase it and then I read out the first draft to my partner. It caused frowns and polite coughing as I corrected and re-wrote while I was reading and half way through I realized that I was stalling in finishing the chapter. It wasn't ready to read out....so I waited and thought about how I needed to be brave and push on.
I knew there was an idea coming, a way of getting some very important information into the story without an information dump and the worst of it was that this information is a red herring of the mystery and I was fearful about getting it wrong. I stopped reading the chapter and walked away for a few days.
When I returned, it flowed and in one sitting I allowed the characters to lead me to the place where they would learn an important fact and allow another character to think out loud on the page....reasoning out a clue which will pitch him into madness and make him a danger.
I sat back and actually said out loud (post midnight and only to myself and my screen) "Yes!"
Over the next weeks I rewrote and edited and corrected. I am at that before-Tutor-assessment-happy stage where I know I am too close and to invested in what I have written to see it in an utterly objective way but not feeling so precious about it that any suggestions made by my Tutor will have me spitting fire. A good place in the path.
My wall is covered in post-it notes of snatched conversations between characters, names that will/could be important and plot tweaks that will reveal themselves and yet I still worry that despite all this (serial killer type) wall, the maps of the area and the notes of the main characters (who/what and how they are) I might lose them; that they will escape me somehow while I am finishing the degrees non-creative requirements and vanish to someone else.
I know this is silly because they are in my head but that nagging voice is there again, only it's changing it's tune a little; now it's saying "get on with it, get on with it!"
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