Thoughts on Writing and Writing It Down

[scribblemyname]

Bare bones journaling again with just flat-out open thoughts and no self-censoring.

On The Voice, watching Luke Wade prep for his performance said some things that hit me in a way I finally got, even if I should've gotten it a while ago. He stopped to think about it and that was when he couldn't make the notes. (Total sidenote: I find I can hit all kinds of notes if I sing all out at high volume and don't overthink it that I can't even dream of hitting otherwise, so makes sense.) It made me realize I need to stop trying to write and just try to write it down.

There's this moment where Pharell told Ryan Sill to find where no one else can do what he does and do that. There's stuff I do with blending my poetic sensibilities and worldbuilding and prose with character studies that is what I do. I can write other stuff, but that's what I do and where I stand out as the one who does that stuff. It only happens when I'm not trying to do it.

The Vardin story, "Portrait of a Butterfly," balanced a huge amount of Vardin mindset and vocabulary and yet it worked for my super-picky (and I like her that way) beta because it did all that. When I try to do that, I can't. I wasn't trying when I wrote Portrait.

I look at Dowse and Bleed. I was trying there, but do you see how incredibly long it took me and it was built around a core of stuff I didn't try to write; I just tried to write it down. My work people love most I just wrote down. The comment fics I can write when longer work is driving me batty and not happening is stuff I just wrote down. I usually call it scribbling, but I'm making a point to myself here.

Don't try to write. Just try to write it down.

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Originally published at Liana Mir. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

Inner editors and self-censoring lead to second-guessing, and that's no way to craft a first draft. I'm not talking about using outlines, because those are just the bare bones indicating where we think a story might want to go. I speak from experience as an obsessive editor and former professional editor. It's hard to let go of the desire for perfection.

The thing I like best about NaNo as a writing exercise is that it gives us permission to not edit. It gives us permission to not even reread, but just, as you say, to write it down. Editing and revision can come later. I find the things that work best are the ones where we have clarity of vision on at least one aspect of the story--a character, a circumstance, a setting--and build around that. If we can see that one thing clearly, it's easy to enable other people to see it too.

Take JK Rowling, who is an okay-to-middling writer from a linguistic/grammar perspective. But wow, is her imagination amazing, and so is her ability to convey the settings around her. What's more important, the vivid world she's created or the nitpicks of too many adverbs? I vote for the former every time, and try not to let the latter bother me when I read her stuff.

I'm not saying things shouldn't be edited later. Of course they should, for so many reasons (hi, Anne Rice and your 5,204 needless expository pages in the middle of every novel). But even those 5,204 pages wouldn't exist if she hadn't given her imagination free reign to put down on paper what she sees in her mind's eye.

I'd venture to guess that people love the stuff you just wrote down the best because it's the most honest, the most from your gut and heart, and that always shows.

[scribblemyname]

And it's totally worst of all when I start editing before I even get the words down! Nothing gets written as I try to "get it right." :headdesk: I forget sometimes that I naturally talk the way I want it to come out and I can't manufacture poetry or flow. I can't plan it.

And this I totally suspect is true, the subconscious being what it is:

I'd venture to guess that people love the stuff you just wrote down the best because it's the most honest, the most from your gut and heart, and that always shows.

Watching The Voice has been a serious exercise in remembering how often you'd point out something about my writing that made serious sense for my process, but I wouldn't always get it the first time. Because seriously, I keep going back to your comments and smacking forehead with duh! This should have been obvious.

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

That's why they paid me the big money. Ha, I tease. It's always easier to constructively critique something from the outside than from the inside.

Learning means repeating the same mistakes over and over until we don't need to make them any more. I can't tell you how many things I've edited where I give the exact same comments on Chapter 32 that I did on the early chapters. We get into habits with our writing and learn certain tactics, and those are really hard to unlearn. It's only through repetition that we finally see things click and have that forehead-smacking moment. We need to understand our patterns before we can change them, in writing and in everything else in life.

[scribblemyname]

So true, this.

Btw, promptly produced 929 on a stalled assignment after this. :shakes head at self: