![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Rebecca might just be hitting her stride!
Nov. 3rd, 2009 11:00 pmToday was the third day of NaNoWriMo. It's very difficult to judge my progress at this point. During the first two days, I wrote about 2100 words, but I'm not happy with a lot of it, and I'm not sure whether I'm going to leave it in or not. Today didn't start out much better. I was so preoccupied with my story for most of the day, and overthinking things is never good. But when I finally sat down and forced myself to write, I ended up with about 2200 words that I think are much better than what I wrote yesterday and Sunday. Maybe I'm finally hitting my stride. But I'm worried that while I have the action mapped out well enough for right now, the plot gets very murky further down. It doesn't help that Sara is doing NaNoWriMo too, and her story is coming along much better than mine. But I do value her opinion, and she's the only one I've shown my story to yet.
The real problem is that I haven't written anything in so long that I'm all rusty. It's just like when I try to speak French after I haven't done it in a while, and it feels like glue in my mouth.
The idea for my story has been in the back of my mind since early 2007, when I saw a production of my very favorite Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice, by the LSU drama department. This production put a very different spin on Jessica, Shylock's daughter, a fairly minor character. It suggested that Lorenzo didn't really love her but was only using her to get to Shylock's money, and that even after she converted to Christianity, the other characters still viewed her as an outsider. (I also saw a French production in Paris in 2008, but it pretty much followed the formula.)
Originally, my idea had been to write the events of the play from Jessica's point of the view (which has been done at least once before, in the young adult novel Shylock's Daughter, which unfortunately I found rather awful) but by now my ideas have changed and evolved so much that they've lost most resemblance to Shakespeare's play. My main problem was the ending; Jessica is either a tragic or empowered figure, depending on how you interpret the play, but ever since I saw the LSU production, I can't see Shakespeare's ending for Jessica as anything but tragic.
According to one of Sara's many name books, The Oxford Dictionary of First Names (which she bought while we were on vacation in London), Jessica is "apparently of Shakespearean origin. This was the name of the daughter of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1596). Shakespeare's source has not been established, but he probably intended it to pass as a typically Jewish name. It may be from a biblical name that appeared, in the translations available in Shakespeare's day, as Jesca (Genesis 11:29; Iscah in the Authorized Version). This occurs in a somewhat obscure genealogical passage; Iscah appears to have been Abraham's niece. Notable bearers of the name include the British actress Jessica Tandy (1909-94), the British writer Jessica Mitford (1917-96), and the American actress Jessica Lange. The name has been extremely popular since the 1990s."
God help me, now I'm posting about names!
The real problem is that I haven't written anything in so long that I'm all rusty. It's just like when I try to speak French after I haven't done it in a while, and it feels like glue in my mouth.
The idea for my story has been in the back of my mind since early 2007, when I saw a production of my very favorite Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice, by the LSU drama department. This production put a very different spin on Jessica, Shylock's daughter, a fairly minor character. It suggested that Lorenzo didn't really love her but was only using her to get to Shylock's money, and that even after she converted to Christianity, the other characters still viewed her as an outsider. (I also saw a French production in Paris in 2008, but it pretty much followed the formula.)
Originally, my idea had been to write the events of the play from Jessica's point of the view (which has been done at least once before, in the young adult novel Shylock's Daughter, which unfortunately I found rather awful) but by now my ideas have changed and evolved so much that they've lost most resemblance to Shakespeare's play. My main problem was the ending; Jessica is either a tragic or empowered figure, depending on how you interpret the play, but ever since I saw the LSU production, I can't see Shakespeare's ending for Jessica as anything but tragic.
According to one of Sara's many name books, The Oxford Dictionary of First Names (which she bought while we were on vacation in London), Jessica is "apparently of Shakespearean origin. This was the name of the daughter of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (1596). Shakespeare's source has not been established, but he probably intended it to pass as a typically Jewish name. It may be from a biblical name that appeared, in the translations available in Shakespeare's day, as Jesca (Genesis 11:29; Iscah in the Authorized Version). This occurs in a somewhat obscure genealogical passage; Iscah appears to have been Abraham's niece. Notable bearers of the name include the British actress Jessica Tandy (1909-94), the British writer Jessica Mitford (1917-96), and the American actress Jessica Lange. The name has been extremely popular since the 1990s."
God help me, now I'm posting about names!
