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Every 18 months to 2 years, I post how I can't write, with the hope that my muse will get her dander up and show me. Here is another of those attempts. And no, my knowing that she knows might still work. Reverse psychology, if you will.
Wendy Jean's thread HTML, testing formating, and search in the Just the FAQs thread had me thinking the best advice is to say that once you write a story with insane amount of formatting, you usually get over the desire of add it in future stories. For me this happened with On the Wall, a story I wrote 5 and a half years ago (wow, that long ago?) and the question caused me to check out the story. In turn, the following paragraph jumped out at me.
Manny was impressed, he knew that anybody who could afford it wore silk underthings beneath their armour, since it left cleaner wounds. A lesson he had learned when a arrow, at skirmish during his third year, had bypassed his shield and his wound had become infected, which had left him in dreadful shape for over a month. Even after this, he had still not been able to afford it, though he had been more fortunate in the type of injuries he had experienced. He was looking forward to the luxury, but he was not prepared for the delicate little item she first handed him, a short skirt of pink silk with a white lace trim.
I wrote that story in a weekend, mostly during an all nighter, now I would not be able to write that paragraph in a weekend. For most of the last 4 years, there is no flow to my writing. I get bogged down at every was, had, and been. The story creating and telling, which are the things I want to do are lost in the grind to get the words into Google Drive. Unfortunately words are what mark the completion of a story and thus the ability to mostly flush it from my mind.
It makes me wonder if a bit less knowledge would serve me better, since that knowledge did not come with a good foundation. Should I just go back to free forming the snot out of passive verbs? Could I clean it up during the editing process without changing the story completely, pulling me out the story flow, making it less of what I want it to be?
Maybe I should just say, screw it, my stories don't need cleaned up. It's just a hobby, I am not looking to make a living out of it. It's not going to change my audience. Is it good enough to tell a story, even if it isn't told particularly well? Sure feels much less organic right now, like I am trying to create something better than maybe I need. It makes me think I should take some courses, but if I am doing that I know I will continue to focus on that which I do for living.
It doesn't suck, my life is mostly what I want it to be. But I do wish the words would come without feeling like I need to push them through a cement wall.
Two things I do know. I wish I could come up with a short story idea. And if I ever finish a new story, I should never write anything about those characters again. There are already a few protagonists whose stories could grow, but whose stories I don't appear to feel like writing.
Here's hoping I can finish my 2012 Christmas contest story this year. Or maybe it will be Manny and Maude (though that seems to be missing something). Of course I need to stop coming up with new ideas, but who knows. I will plug along and see.
Comments
Perfection vs creating
One of the key people who got me writing was Wen Spencer. She wrote in her blog, (I'm going to paraphrase so please forgive my faulty memory!) That until you have your story finished and completed, you don't have anything to edit or that can be judged in any way.
That pushed me to actually complete my first story instead of worrying over every damn comma, phrase, and all the other grammar rules that I'd learned some 30 years before. Holly, Cathy, Hope, and many others helped make those early disasters readable. I'm told and I hope its true that I've improved and my scribbles aren't nearly as bad now. But I did complete that story and more followed. Hell, I even have a pair of completed novels. Who would've thought it!
If you truly have a story to tell, then tell it! Let it out for the world to read! After you get that bad girl down in letters and words, then you can polish off the rough edges. If you keep second guessing yourself about perfection, then no one will ever read those words and never know what you had to say.
Just my poor thoughts on the subject. :)
hugs
Grover
Perfection
Bottom line, it is a hobby.
Now having said that, if it is just a hobby, it sending still deserves doing it well. Let me illustrate with two or three examples.
My father was a precision research machinist. He once milled a perfect two thirds of a sphere to within some ungodly degree of precision, simply because he was told it couldn't be done. He worked his last fifteen years for Civil Service. It paid much less, but it had a great retirement benefit. He took up woodworking as a hobby and created beautiful gifts every year. I think my favorites were the wooden toys. The precision he didn't exercise in his professional life he found in his "hobby."
Your hobby deserves doing it right.
As for me, I worked for Hughes Electronics as a technical writer. Everything I did had to match with the work of a team. Then because it was being managed by the Air Force we would edit the life out of it. Sometimes it had to be dumbed down. Other times it might be suitable for a doctoral thesis. I can remember one project involved the direction of electron flow in a battery. It depends on who you ask. According to the physicists it went one direction, According to the electronic engineers it went the other way. Guess who was in the middle...
So, I reverted to type. At home, I would take an idea and a starting point and start writing. It's only because my "muse" was extremely organized, perhaps anal-retentive, it always surprised the bejeeebers out of me that I'd find a chapter resolved itself in 18 to 22 pages, ending with a cliffhanger.
So too, I sometimes don't know how the idiotic thing was going to end. Which occasionally meant the last chapter held up the whole thing. I kind of decided 200,000 words was enough. If it was going over that limit I'd have to go back and cut the superfluous words out.
For me I the hobby became therapy. I was able to enunciate ideas and subjects that were bedevilling me in real life.
I was able, more or less, to enter the zen like state of writing for myself. I would have that 150,000, and go back to edit the whole thing, multiple times, untill it was something I was happy with. Cause . Heaven knows it ain't worth the bother, at least according to that wonderful barometer of liking or disliking we know as comments.
Accomplish what you want to, then put it to bed... Don't look for payment, you'll only get be dissapointed. Anyway, those are some thing to think about.
-Beth