Bstumped

Like probably most of us, I've been working on my project draft this weekend. And while I've run into a number of problems, I'd like to think they're at least somewhat interesting (that is, blogable) ones.

I decided to do a creative project for Writing Machines, and my goal has been to use photographs and text together -- one on top of the other -- to convey a story. And the photograph-plus-text part works fine. Early on I had wanted the two media to be incoherent if displayed separately, but I found that this was pushing my project in a gimmicky direction, and I relaxed my rules. Now I'm using photographs essentially as "pages" for my text, and it's pretty interesting to see how they lend atmosphere (and, literally, shape) to the writing.

Except I need to somehow couch all of my pages in an online format. Since I'm using a first-person narrator in the piece, and chopping the text up into somewhat brief observations and confessions, it seems natural to implement my photo/pages as a journal -- as a blog. But I've found that this fairly dramatically affects the way I try to write. Each blog entry -- each photograph -- seems like a new beginning. They don't build in the same way that paragraphs do, one after another on the page. And when you try to force them to do so, the artifice is clear. So now I have most of the images that I want to use, and I know very specifically what themes I want to engage, but I just can't figure out how to build a plot into the blog in any sort of subtle way. There's some way that my understanding of the combination of absence and immediacy in the blog format is creating a significant roadblock to me tying my work together.

In the meantime, I've essentially amassed photographs and written interstitial, musing pages from the perspective of my narrator. I'm developing a character, but I'm not yet sure how to give him an active crisis to deal with. I'm sure I will (and time-wise, I'll have to make a go of it in the next few days, even if I don't like it), but until then, the only productive thing that I can wring out of my struggle is a practical understanding of the effects of materiality on the writer.