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More of the writer's life
Mar. 28th, 2010 12:29 pm... and then after complaining about my lack of accomplishment, I was bit with the writing bug yesterday and have written 8000 words since early yesterday afternoon. Go figure.
One of the things that's been holding me back lately, I guess, is getting hung up on the idea that what I write has to be good. That's second-draft thinking. *g*
It's interesting -- there's this trajectory that my writing seems to have followed, where I started out (as a teenager) writing like crazy, all the time, without worrying too much about "quality" or publish-ability or what other people thought about it. "Raven's Children", I think, shows the tail end of that surge of adolescent creativity: like everything I wrote back then, it's marvelously creative and was incredibly fun for me to write, but I think it reads like a promising but meandering first draft that needed to be revised into a final draft.
I've improved tremendously as a writer over the last ten years, I think; fanfic's been a wonderful training ground for prose, and webcomics have helped me hone my skills at plotting and world-building with real-time feedback. And now I feel like I've reached a point where I'm capable of better work than I ever have been, and my targets are more ambitious -- I'm setting my sights seriously on publication. But in the process, I've gotten all wound up in that elusive goal of quality and lost my ability to get caught up in the flow of unrestricted creativity like I used to be able to.
I think the skill I need to master at this stage of the game is revision. Because that unrestricted flow of creativity is why I write; if I don't enjoy it (and for the last couple of years, writing has been an awful slog for me), if I just want to be published for the money and not for the story I have to tell, I may as well get a 9-to-5 job. But I want the "quality" too -- I can see the brass ring dangling just out of reach, the promise of being able to unify plot and character and theme and language into a finished product that I'm really proud of.
So I guess that what I need to learn to do is to compartmentalize -- to throw myself wholeheartedly into the rough draft and turn off the killjoy inner editor, and then to turn off the writer enough to be brutal on my first draft, to prune out the stuff that is making it a weaker story and shape it up into the best it can be. I am not good at that; I tend to be an edit-as-I-go writer, because it's really hard for me to make major changes or cuts to what's already written. And the crazy thing is, that worked fine when I was a poorer writer; what I was producing using that method was the best that I could do at the time. But it doesn't work any more. It's taken me a while to realize that, but I think I'm actually getting good enough -- or maybe just discerning enough, which not exactly the same thing -- that I can't let go enough to write -- all the rough-draft issues are nagging at me and telling me "this is no good; there's no point; you'll never sell it." So I guess I need to learn to stop editing as I go, and instead switch between the two modes deliberately rather than having them both operating at once.
One of the things that's been holding me back lately, I guess, is getting hung up on the idea that what I write has to be good. That's second-draft thinking. *g*
It's interesting -- there's this trajectory that my writing seems to have followed, where I started out (as a teenager) writing like crazy, all the time, without worrying too much about "quality" or publish-ability or what other people thought about it. "Raven's Children", I think, shows the tail end of that surge of adolescent creativity: like everything I wrote back then, it's marvelously creative and was incredibly fun for me to write, but I think it reads like a promising but meandering first draft that needed to be revised into a final draft.
I've improved tremendously as a writer over the last ten years, I think; fanfic's been a wonderful training ground for prose, and webcomics have helped me hone my skills at plotting and world-building with real-time feedback. And now I feel like I've reached a point where I'm capable of better work than I ever have been, and my targets are more ambitious -- I'm setting my sights seriously on publication. But in the process, I've gotten all wound up in that elusive goal of quality and lost my ability to get caught up in the flow of unrestricted creativity like I used to be able to.
I think the skill I need to master at this stage of the game is revision. Because that unrestricted flow of creativity is why I write; if I don't enjoy it (and for the last couple of years, writing has been an awful slog for me), if I just want to be published for the money and not for the story I have to tell, I may as well get a 9-to-5 job. But I want the "quality" too -- I can see the brass ring dangling just out of reach, the promise of being able to unify plot and character and theme and language into a finished product that I'm really proud of.
So I guess that what I need to learn to do is to compartmentalize -- to throw myself wholeheartedly into the rough draft and turn off the killjoy inner editor, and then to turn off the writer enough to be brutal on my first draft, to prune out the stuff that is making it a weaker story and shape it up into the best it can be. I am not good at that; I tend to be an edit-as-I-go writer, because it's really hard for me to make major changes or cuts to what's already written. And the crazy thing is, that worked fine when I was a poorer writer; what I was producing using that method was the best that I could do at the time. But it doesn't work any more. It's taken me a while to realize that, but I think I'm actually getting good enough -- or maybe just discerning enough, which not exactly the same thing -- that I can't let go enough to write -- all the rough-draft issues are nagging at me and telling me "this is no good; there's no point; you'll never sell it." So I guess I need to learn to stop editing as I go, and instead switch between the two modes deliberately rather than having them both operating at once.