Stupid, on the necessity of being

[resonant]

After my three weeks with little or no writing time, last week was a lovely, open week with endless stretches of time, during which I still contrived to get almost nothing at all done.

Here's the thing. When I'm not writing, I don't forget how to write. What I forget how to do is watch myself write crap.

Only, I don't know about you, but for me that's a necessary stage in the writing process.

1. Write something crappy.
2. Fix it.

Or sometimes:

1. See that I'm not ready to write the actual story. Decide instead to write a rough, which is crappy.
2. Write the story, which is only moderately crappy because I've been able to fix some of the problems at the rough stage.
3. Fix it.

So obviously if my brain is in there talking nasty to me and preventing me from doing step 1 ("My god, that's stupid. You can't possibly put down something so stupid. Better just play some Bejeweled or something until you think of something less stupid"), then I can't ever get to steps 2 and 3, which are where the worthwhile stuff happens.

Next time I get out of practice, maybe I'll just make myself sit down and write something that's as bad as I can possibly make it. Get that over with and get on with my work.

Comments

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

I know that one is supposed to be able to write crap, then fix it, but I am totally unable to do that. (Ok, those of you who think my writing is crap? Shut up.)

Instead, I write two words and then stare at them for, oh, five minutes, until I figure out how the rest of the sentence goes. Then I think for 10 minutes about what the next sentence should be, write a few words of that, and then stare again until I have the sentence worked out perfectly in my head so I can type the rest of it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

My first draft is very close to the semi-final product that the betas get. The only reason it's not necessarily the same is that I keep obsessively looking over the earlier parts of the story and tweaking it minutely. This is why I am agog with envy at people who report they have written [some large number of words] in a day. It takes me hours just to get a few paragraphs out.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

See, mostly my sentences aren't stupid; I do polish as I go along. (Though I've never been as productive as I was during the period when the kidlet thought it was fun to take all the erasers out of all my mechanical pencils, so maybe all that polishing is a problem after all.)

The trouble is that in the first draft my pacing is almost always stupid, and often my ideas are stupid. So my rough drafts will contain a lot of things like:

[hang on, this is just like that other story where John wasn't there when they first went to Atlantis]

and

[wait, wait, actually I think at this point it would work better if Rodney thinks he's her lover, and then only later finds out he's her son]

and stuff like that.

But apparently I can only solve those problems, or even locate them, by writing them. (Or sometimes by talking about them.) Evidently for me the stupid stuff has to find its way into words before I can get rid of it.

[isiscolo.livejournal.com]

Heh, stupid ideas are just like stupid sentences for me. So I will stop dead and be unable to continue until the brackety stuff gets worked out in my head. To be perfectly honest, usually what happens is that I just ignore the story and then the next morning I go running, and somewhere between the high school and the park the ideas start resolving themselves.

If it works for you, though, that writing the problem makes you find and solve it, yay for you!

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I think that y'all who can work like this must be much less hard-core procrastinatious than I am. Because I am capable of quite literally playing Bejeweled for six hours in a row -- seriously, I've done it -- slack-jawed and thinking about nothing at all and just as blocked at the end as I was at the beginning.

On the other hand, if I take a walk or do something physical (even housework), I usually have more ideas when I'm done. The spouse is fond of a quote from Nietzsche that goes something like, "Mistrust all ideas that come when you are sitting down."

[http://users.livejournal.com/solo____/]

I've added your post to my memories because that's so exactly how it works for me, and I've never quite managed to put it into words. My drafts are always full of those brackets, and question marks, and footnotes to myself... and when it gets truly desperate, the colour coding comes out. But I *have* to write all that crap down.

And then I delete half of it and fix the rest.

[commodorified.livejournal.com]

I do that too. Though, admittedly, it STILL gets at least two hard edits thereafter.

My first draft is all about Figuring Out What Happens, and those details HAVE to get put down somehow.

Second draft is usually all about unpacking: *I'm* totally clear on what happens by then, but it's not necessarly all there in the STORY. Invariably, I get notes back from betas on first drafts that say "hey, wait, how did they get THERE? Why's he doing THAT?"

So then it all has to go in.

Third draft is me overcoming my tendancy to overvalue terseness.

Fourth is style and period accuracy and anachronism removal and what we call squid patrol -- removing accidental stuff that survived from earlier drafts and is misleading, and suchlike.

Fifth is copy editing. Done with at least one other person, over IM.

Sixth is proofreading. Done by at least two people, working separately.

(And this, my friends, is why I post maybe four stories a year.)

But getting started again -- yeah. I write stuff, and I despair, because it's first-draft quality and I've mislaid the ability to see that as a fine and natural stage.

And I can't write drabbles, really. Not often. So it's heroic measures or none...

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I once sat down and figured out my whole writing process like that, and then I thought, "Damn! And I'm a lazy slob! What must it be like for people who are actually hard-working?"

[indywind]

So totally right there with you.
My first draft is my penultimate draft, I don't know how not to think that way. So when the muse doesn't feed me the sentances that run together beautifully, I just get hung; anything I write might as well be "and then they resolve all the problems in some way that makes sense, then they do the sex, the end, yay."

[mhw.livejournal.com]

I have a suggestion. It may seem completely loopy, but it may work for you. It certainly can't do any harm.

You see, when I write, I can't help looking back up the page and seeing what I've been writing. If I'm in an overly critical mood, as you seem to be, that can make it hard to continue, as I feel I have to go back and fix, endlessly. So what I do is I resize the window for whatever it is that I'm writing with (I use WordTabs) so that I have just one visible line, the one that I'm typing into. That way I can't see what I've been writing, or rather it cuts down the area that I can criticise to one line.

Give it a go and see if it's as good for you as it is for me?

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Hee -- it's an excellent idea, for people who can compose on a computer, but I'm not one of them. I write everything in longhand, because my computer is just a big box of procrastination.

I could do something like write one sentence per page or something, but for me the self-censorship starts before a single word hits the page.

[china_shop]

I think for me a lot of it is about the limited time available. It's not just, "Oh god, that's crap!" It's also, "And I only have two hours of writing time! I'm wasting it! Arrgh!"

Earlier this year when I had heaps of discretionary time, I didn't have that sense of scarcity: I knew that if whatever I was writing didn't work, I could re-write it or start again or write something else entirely. But now that I'm trying to fit writing in around working, there's that extra anxiety about making every spare minute count. You know? Too Much Pressure.

Mostly I manage to relax into it, but when I'm having trouble, that's usually why.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Ooh, yeah, I know what you mean.

I look back at my Sentinel days, and I used to publish a story a month, even though I was working full-time back then and the kidlet was much more labor-intensive. I have no idea how I did it.

Of course, I didn't have chat then. Or LJ. So there you go.

[kaneko.livejournal.com]

Here's the thing. When I'm not writing, I don't forget how to write. What I forget how to do is watch myself write crap.

Wow, that is so true, and I'd never realised it before. I just had a little revelatory moment - thank you!

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

We'll see who forgets first and falls back into despair. I hate the way I have to keep learning the same life lessons over and over.

[ethrosdemon.livejournal.com]

ok, all I really care about is how cute the frickin' wombat in your icon is. I am dying.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

Hee! It's cute, isn't it? Of course I've never seen one in real life.

I once asked kaneko, "Are there any North American animals that are as adorable to you as all your animals are to us?" and she said, "Oh, squirrels!" Which proves that a certain amount of cuteness is just scarcity, I suppose.

[viva-gloria.livejournal.com]

entirely with you on this. I've got into the habit of morning pages -- three pages long-hand every morning, first thing -- as promoted by Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way. I can take or leave a lot of her ideas but this seems to burn off a lot of the dross that's in my head ... even when I start plotting out a story in morning pages, what I end up writing later in the day bears little resemblance to my initial notes, but is usually better.

Also it's the perfect place to write down all the little whines that spiral around in my head and get in the way of plot.

The only way I can tell how well this worked is that I had to stop writing morning pages a while back -- heavy-duty contract, just couldn't cope with getting up early enough to do it -- and my writing (and general intellect) really suffered. It took a while to get back into the groove, too.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I like that idea. I have a feeling it would jump-start more writing during all the little breaks in the day, too.

I learned from Eddie's Anti-Procrastination Site that it's a lot easier to start again later if you stop in the middle of a sentence.

[lobelia321.livejournal.com]

I wish I could be as practical about it as you are. And as philosophical. I am so terrified of writing crap. Which means, you've guessed it, that I write nothing.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I have the same problem, truly, but now that I've recognized it, I'm hoping I'll be quicker to spot it when it comes up. Because, yeah, better something mediocre but fixable, or even something that's just throat-clearing but leads to something real, than, like, nothing at all.

blah

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

*nods* that's one school of writing, and I still think more people should adhere to it, while the other says that only the spontaneous immediate first written texts are true and worthwhile ... and I guess I should adhere to that occasionally when over-correcting and not knowing when to stop.
I'd wager if you tried to write crap on purpose, after a page or two you'd start writing what you consider non-crap, maybe without noticing.
Or maybe I am just projecting.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I think you're right about the writing crap. In fact, I can usually feel it when the 'real' writing kicks in, and sometimes when I read over my notebooks I'll find something like this:

... today," John said impatiently, and then -- hey, wait a minute, this needs to be John's POV! And then it starts back during the banquet, instead of picking up the next morning, so then we see him hatching the plot! So he's sitting there being annoyed, and, like, "It would be really, really bad to deceive someone on purpose, John thought, but if anyone deserved such a thing, it would be this blowhard ..."

and then I'm off.

the other says that only the spontaneous immediate first written texts are true and worthwhile

Well, I'll be diplomatic and just say that this is definitely not true for me.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

Oh please don't be diplomatic, nobody here can hear you!


So how's it going, writing again? Happily starting with crap or already writing brilliantly from word one?

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I'm starting with the crap, but there's a little less of it every day before I get to the real stuff; seem to be getting my momentum back a little.

And you?

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

Cool :)


*does J's sideways moue* Even after posting it, I was caught up in thoughts about "Master of the Manor" for a week, and now RL worries keep me from finishing the 4 snippets I should get out.