Underline the Red is one of those stories that keeps tripping me up when I work on it, because I envisioned a lot of these later stages around like, 3 years ago, and a lot has changed so that when I arrive at certain points, the thing I was sure I was going to write no longer seems like the right thing to do, and then I experience a particular kind of writer's block that I like to think of as 'rigid author with autism encounters a need to be flexible and is going to need a few days or weeks to remember it's okay to pivot if that works for the story.'
Part of it - and this is a thing I've talked about before - is that when you imagine a story or character arc, or even plot it, sometimes that character will be ready to evolve or change sooner than you expected, or alternatively, the angst/whump part you envisioned lasting X long without a break, you realise through writing, it's just actually too long, too visceral, there needs to be something else here. High fidelity to a pre-imagined way of doing things in this instance can really betray the way the story wants to flow.
Look at it this way. You have a dry riverbed, and the rains have come, and the flow is coming. You have predicted based on reading thousands of dry riverbeds, that the river will probably flow here, and there, and over there. You're mostly right. Except! Maybe there was more rain, maybe there's an extra tributary, maybe it's not flowing in one area at all, and if you don't adapt quickly, that river will burst its banks, be a muddied mess, and you'll be left in a swamp.
(This is often good for ecosystems, but it's not often good as in this awful metaphor for figuring out a narrative).
This is actually the main reason I don't solidly plot stories and don't write to a plot. I have internalised a lot of story beats over the years, I've read a lot of dry riverbeds and I've successfully seen the flow through of tons of water in them (worst metaphor god fucking damn it).
And it's taught me that sometimes when the water wants to flow differently, the river will be better if you let it. More alive, more artistic, more real, more meaningful. Because nothing can be exactly the same very time and I learn and change and therefore the way things flow change too.
In this case the writer's block is very literally me blocking the flow of the river because I've just realised the pre-made shape is wrong.
Now it's just...figuring out what works in its place.
(I'm still keeping most of my story beats, it's just the timeline that's changing a little).
kaledo-art
andulkaphoto
areudirty
pixelskylines
tangentwithtanner
vaporwave
yousharknotpass
