tiggymalvern (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tiggymalvern) wrote2019-06-06 04:55 pm
tiggymalvern) wrote2019-06-06 04:55 pm
Random Rambling on Writing and Hannibal
Sex scenes and fight scenes are always the ones that are a real slog for me to write. Dialogue comes to me in a flash when I'm hiking, or in bed, or doing yoga, or driving to work, whole scenes with words and setting and the nuances of the characters' mannerisms, and then I have to rush to scribble it all down before it escapes again. Mental stuff like dreams and imagery and characters' thought processes magically arrive in the same way, and it's all so easy and fun.
There are a few components of sex scenes and fight scenes that do that - any bits of conversation during sex, or the initial concept behind it, like the idea in Direct Current that this is an angry sex scene with Will trying to provoke Hannibal into fighting him so he can remind himself he's doing this to catch the Chesapeake Ripper, not falling in love with him. But in the end both sex scenes and fight scenes come down to the minutiae of physical detail, of exactly whose hands are where, how undressed they are, or how someone moves around an injury. There's no way that's coming as divine inspiration - it just has to be worked through, step by step, move by move, one sentence after the next keeping track of exactly what stage we're at and trying to make it all sound interesting and exciting at the same time. It's hard work!
Unsurprisingly, that means those scenes tend to be written towards the end, after all the inspirational stuff is done. I have these great, glaring gaps staring at me, that I then painfully add 200 words to over the course of an hour, then another couple of hundred the next day.
I finally finished the last sex scene in my current WIP last night, and it's such a relief to have that done and out of the way. I ended up with one more sex scene than I originally thought, because my annoying brain decided it would better illustrate character progression and how Will changes around Hannibal.
I still have the big fight scene waiting for me, though. And I'm working through all these stills of Hannibal's house, piecing together where everything is, and OMG, Hannibal, why do you have so much stuff? Multiple weird objects on every available surface, and I have to look at all of them through the eyes of a character who canonically weaponises a tea towel....
There are a few components of sex scenes and fight scenes that do that - any bits of conversation during sex, or the initial concept behind it, like the idea in Direct Current that this is an angry sex scene with Will trying to provoke Hannibal into fighting him so he can remind himself he's doing this to catch the Chesapeake Ripper, not falling in love with him. But in the end both sex scenes and fight scenes come down to the minutiae of physical detail, of exactly whose hands are where, how undressed they are, or how someone moves around an injury. There's no way that's coming as divine inspiration - it just has to be worked through, step by step, move by move, one sentence after the next keeping track of exactly what stage we're at and trying to make it all sound interesting and exciting at the same time. It's hard work!
Unsurprisingly, that means those scenes tend to be written towards the end, after all the inspirational stuff is done. I have these great, glaring gaps staring at me, that I then painfully add 200 words to over the course of an hour, then another couple of hundred the next day.
I finally finished the last sex scene in my current WIP last night, and it's such a relief to have that done and out of the way. I ended up with one more sex scene than I originally thought, because my annoying brain decided it would better illustrate character progression and how Will changes around Hannibal.
I still have the big fight scene waiting for me, though. And I'm working through all these stills of Hannibal's house, piecing together where everything is, and OMG, Hannibal, why do you have so much stuff? Multiple weird objects on every available surface, and I have to look at all of them through the eyes of a character who canonically weaponises a tea towel....
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Also I'm finding that while some images might "magically arrive" the way you describe about other imagery, it is still a lot more exhausting to try to translate that into something that has a shot of giving a reader the same image.
Congrats on finishing your sex scenes and good luck with the action scene!
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To me, that's pretty much the definition of a slog - it takes four times as long as writing anything else :-(
Dialogue definitely translates the easiest, because it's already there - I just need to add in the surrounding actions bewteen the lines that describe the character movements and facial expressions. But even things like Will's weird, hallucinations/dreams seem to come to me in enough detail that I have no problem writing them out in creepy words with reasonable efficiency.
I do have a couple more 'fun' scenes to write before I really have to do the fight scene, thankfully. Part of the reason for forcing myself to get the sex scenes out of the way was so that I didn't have to do ALL of the difficult stuff back to back!
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