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."