This Is Not Good

For a couple of months I've been bemoaning my lack of writing opportunities. I was used to having a full four hours of work time, which, due to circumstances, got reduced to one or two hours at the most, a couple of days a week.

Well, guess what? More writing time makes things worse. I had a rare long writing day yesterday, and I wrote drivel. (No, I'm not going back to read it. Just trust me.)

I don't know what happened, but the obvious culprit is, I'm bored with this story. That's sad, since I've come so far and have finally reached the beginning of the end. It's not that I came up with bad ideas yesterday, but I applied absolutely no writing skill to them. I didn't even try to. It's just line upon line of dialogue, mostly. That's not a novel; it's a screenplay. 

In order to fix this manuscript, I will need to go back through it and somehow formulate a proper story. I'm dubious that I can do it. 

I suppose, in my defense, I wanted to get the ideas down. That kind of worked ~ I came up with a few good ones ~ but they were mostly expressed by way of conversations. Plus, the sequencing is schizophrenic. I'm hopping all over the place. One minute the main character is depressed (way over-written) because all twenty songs she and her co-writer sent off for the mentor's consideration (for inclusion on an upcoming CD) have received zero response. Complete radio silence. My God, she's crying and pacing and unable to sleep, which is quite the over-reaction. I can see being disappointed, but throwing her entire existence into a tailspin is a bit much. The real reason why she's so upset is that she impulsively wrote a song that hit too close to the mark regarding the mentor's life, and now she's sure that it killed their relationship. That still doesn't excuse all the drama.

While this breakdown is occurring, MC gets a call out of the blue from her former A&R guy. This was one idea I'd had percolating (rare for me), in which he slips her some inside information about her now-invalidated recording contract. So now, she's switched to thinking about that. See what I mean? Oh, look! Her tears dried up just like that! 

Oh, but her co-writer cousin is still pestering her every day to find out if the mentor has responded. (Fortuitously, he's not crying, at least.) He's bummed, not for any relationship reasons, but because of the blow to his professional pride. MC realizes, hey, this is a big deal to him. (Only a minute ago it was a big deal to her, too, but she's instantaneously moved on.) Then the two start reminiscing about writing songs together when they were younger. This was the only "fun" part of my entire day. I came up with some good anecdotes that showed the depths of their long musical relationship.

Then the story switches to the A&R guy flying into town to produce the band's CD. 

When I think about all this, I feel like I'm nuts. And I repeat, this was almost entirely dialogue. How in the hell can I ever fix this? The events themselves are fine, but they're zig-zagging all over the place, none of them lasting long enough for a reader to grab hold of.

Where once the story was slow and leisurely, now it's sped up to almost a maniacal pace. 

According to a lot of writers, they just love going back and re-reading their masterpieces. I dread the notion. Yes, they're "pieces", but hardly masterly. 

Is it possible I still might scrap the entire project?  Yes.