Saturday, June 9, 2012

Being Michelangelo

Today Taliesin and I were discussing our impending doom, aka how in just ten days we have to begin writing our novels. After I read a Frankenstein analogy retweeted by Jenny, we got to talking about the steps to creating a novel and came up with our own analogy: Being Michelangelo. I've never been much of a sculptor, but I know what it's like to turn a rough sketch into a finished drawing. But Taliesin mentioned chiseling out a statue and I found it fitting because, a perfect slab of marble looks pretty (the swirly mist stage where you haven't made any firm decisions and your idea looks great), then you have to make it all ugly by breaking into it (the decisions), then you start seeing a human figure but it's all wonky and ugly (the first draft), then it improves (the following drafts) and so forth until hopefully you've polished it so well you're left with your masterpiece. Even Michelangelo has to make a crappy statue before he makes a perfect statue.

This should have already been obvious to me, but for some reason imagining it out is helping me cope with my feelings of "ruining" my pristine marble slab by hitting it with those initial hammer strokes, cutting away the areas I won't need when I start the first draft of the body. It's giving me new courage.


Music

Thought I'd share some of the songs that are inspiring my WIP.

LI theme - "Too Close" by Alex Clare. I twist the lyrics in my head for this one, it's not that he's growing apart from the MC, it's more that he and the MC are so goal-oriented that he feels like they're too deep in their missions to fall in love.

MC theme - "Not In Love feat. Robert Smith" by Crystal Castles. Similar to the other song, the MC is resisting falling for the LI, rather than it being over. For some reason these songs just work in my head even though the lyrics are off.

Love theme - "Melody" Clark Owen feat. Lena Katina. The way they sing the duet parts is perfect for when the MC and LI are working together.

10 days left!!! Ahhhhhhhh!!!