Writing Thoughts (Ooh, Inventive Title)
Nov. 3rd, 2007 02:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jheti
Inspired by Laylah, who lives over at InsaneJournal now. I'd been thinking of ranting about this before, but her post somehow gave me the shove to do so.
It's not asskissing if it happens to be the truth. *Shrug.*
As a writer: I'm one of those undisciplined, feral layabouts that writes by the seat of her pants. Or the skin of her teeth, if you're into that kind of thing.
This is long; feel free to hop around by convenient lj-cuts and/or not finish.
This is arrogant. I am arrogant. Dun liek dun read. Come on, pretty. Don't act like you don't want some of this.
About markets: the only thing I've been both published and paid for is poetry. I did publish an essay last year, for a scholarship, and placed but didn't win. That happens with some consistency. I'm still excited, because it's my first NONFICTION op-ed piece to have been at least accepted someplace. It could happen more often if I had the energy and were just a touch more masochistic. I might even make sales. I don't have the energy. We'll get to that in a bit.
I used to write the kind of bodice-ripping garbage that virgins typically write. I was actively, aggressively courting the market. Had a few tentative "maybe possibly we will consider it, DENIED" sales lined up. My hard drive died. So did the only male human I have ever trusted or am ever likely to trust in the future.
I will dutifully roll over at least twice. I promised I would. But I don't forsee trusting whoever gets there first. At least I don't expect it to be fun or feel good. Puts me well ahead of all the other silly geese with stars in their eyes and rhinestone cellphones bouncing from their glasscutter hipbones.
Wait, where was I? Oh, right.
Rejection letters do not bother me; I've had dozens.
About rejection: these people man the slush piles all day long. They do not know who you are, and they do not care. This helps me a great deal. It's much easier to receive an anonymous letter from someone you do not know and have never met than it is to, for example, argue over the phone with someone you care about. After the third letter, it simply doesn't register anymore. You're just like, "Oh, look, someone else who won't be buying the manuscript."
In the event that they say "yes" or even "maybe", it's both the surprise of the century and cause for celebration.
Yes is better than no, but no is nothing to be scared of, because these people don't know you. It's the same kind of anonymity shield that makes the Internet perfect, except in Bookland, it's actually there. There's no MySpace for them to hunt down orDelphic Oracle Google to consult about your personal darknesses.
God, I've been waiting all year to let that out. Anyway.
This isn't hearing voices. Having weathered some flashbacks, I can tell you with reasonable confidence, that the "voices" one "hears" of any given narrating character are not, generally, hallucinatory.
This is why I'm not published more often. My natural "voice" for prose is a deep and vibrant shade of purple. XD
What I'm trying to say is, most writers are not psychotic. I'm not sure what the hell is wrong with us, with writers as a species, as each of us has a unique assortment of quirks and damages--"everybody's different"--but it would appear that most individual writers are sane.
(Don't get me started on "an historic", I will froth for hours, I once wrote a several-thousand-word diatribe on the subject, complete with actual BOOK research to support my stance, and here I am, once more in Tangent Province.)
In brief: you're not nuts. I hear them, too. We're all mad here. Pass the tea.
I talk to myself. I learned to do this from characters like Thomas Magnum, who talked to themselves on the TV. I aquired this habit before anyone explained to me that I shouldn't. Adults would say "DON'T DO THAT" and never offer up a shred of reasoning as to why it was wrong or harmful. So I ignored them.
I was twelve or thirteen when someone finally told me, "People will think you're crazy." By then it was too late to stop. I got better at pretending. The average person is so stuck on him or herself and their own personal dramas that they never notice a thing.
I've been telling myself stories for about...twenty-two years?...and they were always initially fanfiction, what we now consider fanfiction, in some form.
When I was five and struggling to master the vile instrument of torture known in common vernacular as a pencil, "fanfiction"--copying down the intro speeches and text of Zelda or the Ninja Turtles--kept me interested in ghastly handwriting lessons.
The way we write in English is excruciating left-handed. I don't know if it's the same for right-handed people or for other languages. I have a series of calluses on my left middle finger from my inability to hold a writing instrument the way a right-handed person can/should. Writing longhand hurts, it always has, and I tire quickly.
To sum up: fandom made my writing quasi-legible and gave me a place to try out ideas.
"Muses" is a loanword from fandom at large. I use it to refer to the characters I consistently recognize, who recur in my head and periodically "tell" me their stories in varying levels of internal audio clarity.
For me, muses are the same sort of voice as that "little voice in your head."
Right there! The one that just told you "What does she mean? I don't have a voice in my head! Maybe she has a voice in her head."
Your internal narrator, lovely. Mine simply speaks dialects or has accents.
I have one original character who "speaks" clearly to me (the cynical college boy), two transplants (Brin, and Baraka with a heavy edit job), and two MK fan-characters with loose, quasi-vocal identities (Brin and Koteth).
As it stands, Mileena, with whom I have been close for over a decade, is the only one with very clear, consistent diction patterns and word/action choice. I have discovered, to my eternal inconvenience, that I cannot make her do anything she does not want to do.
There are four of her in here, but they're all the same character with slightly different aspects; they can't "meet up" and "trade notes" in my head, because there's nothing different about them at the core.
I do not have, nor have I ever had, a human Mileena. Not out of prejudice; she simply never appeared to me as human. Even before I knew what she looked like she was inhuman, gholia, created-thing, not properly alive or properly souled the way her beautiful sister was. Clay and curses and stolen royal blood.
Baraka used to narrate to me, but I don't "hear" much from him anymore, and haven't really "heard" from the Shadows crew in general over the course of perhaps the last two years. They started to "go quiet" in late '05 and Mileena just started murmuring at me again a few weeks ago in rushed, jagged tangles, but the others are still "quiet".
My fan characters are laid-back, experimental sorts. They pop up to "correct" me if I'm about to do something they find too hideously out-of-character to bear, but are usually "quiet" by default.
Greed is not vocal; I get a sense of placement, a kind of "yes/no" pendulum-dowsing basic sense of what he will and will not do, will and will not say, but he has never "spoken" to me.
Kimbley "talks" to himself within the range of my hearing occasionally. He's "loudest" when I'm at school, and has no interest in "telling me" his story, the way Mileena does. He likes to make fun of the other students, and me, and then disappear again.
Everything and everyone else? I either observe them by "listening" to what the muses have to "say", or simply make up as I go along.
That does happen. I can actually formulate ideas by myself. It's just a far more painful and infinitely less easy way of doing things. XD
There you have it. Ask questions if you like, 'cause that's all I could think of.
This is the easiest kind of writing, an advanced game of find-the-word or fill in the blank. Read the rubrik, attend lectures or read the entrance requirements and perhaps a sample copy of the publication to understand what the teacher/publisher wants, and then give it to them.
As far as technical construction goes, it's always the same. "This (concept/idea/formula) works/does not work so well BECAUSE (insert reasons and back them up with facts)." That's all. You'll generally be better received if you have or can cultivate either a very techincally precise voice or a warmish cozy narrative tone.
It's like baking a cake or something similar, but with facts and/or experience-based opinions instead of flour. It's deceptively simple and tends to consume the bulk of my writing time, interest, and energy these days.
The above formula works well enough to get me published, if not purchased. I assume this means I need improvement (doesn't everyone? Constantly?) but am apparently barking up the correct tree.
Start with an idea. I've never not had an idea. "I don't know what to write" is a statement that puzzles me. I don't know how to write stuff that isn't blind alleys and dead ends much of the time, but I've never not known what to WRITE.
If your hands hurt you (mine do), get a computer. You don't even have to learn to type properly, though you'll be able to churn out more words faster, and thus find the route to a decent idea that actually WORKS faster, too.
That part of the process takes me a great deal of time. I'm always trying to do too much in too little space. I like to epic myself into a corner. I'll see a new scenario or fandom or character, and suddenly everything wants to be Lord of the Rings HUGEANTIC AND SWEEPINGLY MASSIVE.
I used to follow that blindly. That's where "Mirrorworld" and "Shadows" both came from. XD
These days, I basically wait for that urge to pass and let the ideas simmer.
For me, that stage is the hardest. It's torture. But it passes. It always passes. It typically takes about a week to a month, and then it's gone. I'm frequently left with an idea that works for a few thousand words. I go directly from the idea to the computer and sling it down. I don't want the idea to get cold or disappear or go wonky on me. There will come a time to improve it, but now is not that time.
As soon as the idea stops being painfully epic and starts to look like a manageable scenario-chunk, write it down immediately. Do not stop until you run out of scene and/or the character stops "talking". You want every shred of that idea. Capture it as soon as you can. You'll have more editing to do, but you'll also have more raw material to do it with.
My inner editor is a vicious bitch. I do not like dealing with her, and I make a point of never doing so with any given scene until that scene is finished. She's too voracious to accept waiting for the end of a 3-to-30k word chunk of several interlaced scenes/"the whole story". I used to try and make her wait until the end, the way they advise in all the books, and she ate whole reams of some of my better stuf in retaliation.
They'll tell you endlessly, "kill your darlings". One of the beauties of fanfiction is that you don't really have to. As long as you have decent grammar and one or two cool ideas, let 'er rip. Half the Internet won't even know the difference.
In all fairness, my shit really improved once I started going on "darling-killing" sprees. But it takes time, actually wanting to do it is definitely an acquiredfetish taste, and fanfiction is a safe place to let "darlings" roam out to pasture before you shoot them.
Heh. XD
Sometimes, I get stuff that comes out finished all in one rush: Disbanded is probably my best example. But that's rare and somewhat lucky. I get between two and four of those a year, max.
My other stories that come out "whole" hover somewhere in the neighbor of 1,000 - 3,000 words. Drabbles and one-sentence fics represent solid effort on my part, and frequently require more drafting/editing than longer work. I'm not good at tightening the leash, shortening the output. I know I have that problem. I consciously work on it when I feed the inner editor.
It's unbelievably bastard hard to write a drabble that's exactly 100 words. Mine typically come out at 101, 103, or 107. Getting a pure drabble takes much editing and killing of darlings.
When I'm "on", when the writing is running from my fingertips without me having to push, I'll get between 500 and 900 words for an epic fic; that's generally a scene. My introductory sentences for any given scene are typically 6 words exactly. (I've noticed this in recent years.)
My hardest lesson in the actual drafting stage has been this: writing in the "on" state is best.
They tell you "don't wait to be inspired, don't wait for inspiration, or you'll never get anything done." This is both true and false. On a deadline, you obviously cannot wait for inspiration. In a fictional frame, you can't wait for it, or you'll be one of those writers who never updates, like me. I've found, however, that pushing ahead without waiting for it simply creates drivel, headaches, and MORE dead-ends and false starts to clean up and axe, and then you have to start over again anyway.
The solution is to get inspired. (See "inducing the 'on' state", three paragraphs down.)
"On" state is the closest thing living writers have to Nirvana. When I'm "on", I can feel it; the words just come, sometimes with alternate-word-choices already included, or the character is "talking" so fast I almost can't keep up. That's when I get the stuff that's clearest, cleanest, and best-formed in the initial draft itself.
Pushing the writing tends to backfire spectacularly, causing a waste of effort and resources that, if I had just waited for the "on" state, could have at least gotten the damn thing FINISHED faster. Perhaps it would have been a few days later, or a week later, but it would have come out solid and workable instead of utter shit that must be erased and redone.
You'll do a lot more erasing and redoing all around, no matter what stage you're at, if you have a Nazi inner editor like I do. On the other hand, having her around means I have a certain basic level of quality that TyPiNg LiEk DiZz and "lol i suk at sumeriez" couldn't compete with if its author's life depended on it. So there is a nice trade-off. I don't hate her; she's just not easy to work with most of the time.
AND NOW: The "on" state can be induced by some of the following: good music, a change of scenery--going to the bookstore or the park, or just standing in your backyard and looking around for a few minutes--ANYTHING other than the walls or tabletop you've been looking at the whole time you've been writing/typing, journalling first (paper or virtual), and other books and films.
Many well-respected authors will tell you that reading other fiction and/or watching films is a bad idea. It probably is, for original fiction. Personally, the "on" state is more important to me than whether or not I get sued in the future, so I disregard this maxim. Especially for writing fanfiction. That's why they're well-respected and I'm not. Oh fucking well. If their way worked for me, I'd use it.
A good alternative solution is to put on a documentary. I love the Animal Planet ones about the ocean. ^_^ Get up, step away from the writing, and watch the pretty pictures and soothing, drony voice until the coiled panic of "oh god, I'm not on, I'll never be on again, I can't write and everything I write sucks anyways" blurs and disappears into the background.
Other useful distractions from this mindset include hot showers and/or a wank. Booze is good for the idea stage but very, very, EXTREMELY bad for the writing stage and can numb or kill the "on" entirely.
The "on" state is hampered or killed entirely by the following: lack of sleep, dehydration, long commutes, sinus infections, and college.
The cure for lack of sleep is sleep. The cure for dehydration is water, juice, or celery. Note: alcohol does not improve dehydration. Sinus infections are cured by expensive pills that I cannot afford, and mitigated somewhat by Benadryl, which I can. The cure for long commutes is ownership of a car.
There is no cure for college. College is where BNFs go TO DIE.
*Ahem.*
My editing strategy is to take out all the extra articles first, starting with "a", because it's the shortest one, so it's frequently overlooked; sometimes that single keystroke can hoist the text up a full line, which, even in hypertext, helps with ease of reading.
Shorter lines are easier to read. The audience will generally absorb more faster and with better retention. So kill every "a" you can. Then kill his big brother, "the".
People have suggested killing "of" to me before, too, but I find that hard. It makes my sentence structures go wibbly.
I don't kill adverbs; I don't see the point. It's quite in vogue just now, though, apparently. <--Lol illustrative case. If it works for you, great, but don't expect me to do it.
Kill verbs. What I mean is, give them steroids. Here's a detective-novel sounding example: Use "slaughtered" for "killed" and "fled" for "ran". The word count is the same, but the picture's punched up. It is possible to go too far with that idea, but it doesn't hurt to try it on every third sentence or so, from a purely technical standpoint.
And my fingers hurt now, so I'm going to stop typing.
I was originally trying to get to "Outlining: Why I Don't Use It", but I have a hand cramp. XD
LOL ENTRY LENGTH = about 3,100 words. See? Told you.
Yes, Virginia, there are typos. I'm not fixing them. My hands hurt. *Whine whine snarl lick paws.*
It's not asskissing if it happens to be the truth. *Shrug.*
As a writer: I'm one of those undisciplined, feral layabouts that writes by the seat of her pants. Or the skin of her teeth, if you're into that kind of thing.
This is long; feel free to hop around by convenient lj-cuts and/or not finish.
This is arrogant. I am arrogant. Dun liek dun read. Come on, pretty. Don't act like you don't want some of this.
About markets: the only thing I've been both published and paid for is poetry. I did publish an essay last year, for a scholarship, and placed but didn't win. That happens with some consistency. I'm still excited, because it's my first NONFICTION op-ed piece to have been at least accepted someplace. It could happen more often if I had the energy and were just a touch more masochistic. I might even make sales. I don't have the energy. We'll get to that in a bit.
I used to write the kind of bodice-ripping garbage that virgins typically write. I was actively, aggressively courting the market. Had a few tentative "maybe possibly we will consider it, DENIED" sales lined up. My hard drive died. So did the only male human I have ever trusted or am ever likely to trust in the future.
I will dutifully roll over at least twice. I promised I would. But I don't forsee trusting whoever gets there first. At least I don't expect it to be fun or feel good. Puts me well ahead of all the other silly geese with stars in their eyes and rhinestone cellphones bouncing from their glasscutter hipbones.
Wait, where was I? Oh, right.
Rejection letters do not bother me; I've had dozens.
About rejection: these people man the slush piles all day long. They do not know who you are, and they do not care. This helps me a great deal. It's much easier to receive an anonymous letter from someone you do not know and have never met than it is to, for example, argue over the phone with someone you care about. After the third letter, it simply doesn't register anymore. You're just like, "Oh, look, someone else who won't be buying the manuscript."
In the event that they say "yes" or even "maybe", it's both the surprise of the century and cause for celebration.
Yes is better than no, but no is nothing to be scared of, because these people don't know you. It's the same kind of anonymity shield that makes the Internet perfect, except in Bookland, it's actually there. There's no MySpace for them to hunt down or
God, I've been waiting all year to let that out. Anyway.
This isn't hearing voices. Having weathered some flashbacks, I can tell you with reasonable confidence, that the "voices" one "hears" of any given narrating character are not, generally, hallucinatory.
This is why I'm not published more often. My natural "voice" for prose is a deep and vibrant shade of purple. XD
What I'm trying to say is, most writers are not psychotic. I'm not sure what the hell is wrong with us, with writers as a species, as each of us has a unique assortment of quirks and damages--"everybody's different"--but it would appear that most individual writers are sane.
(Don't get me started on "an historic", I will froth for hours, I once wrote a several-thousand-word diatribe on the subject, complete with actual BOOK research to support my stance, and here I am, once more in Tangent Province.)
In brief: you're not nuts. I hear them, too. We're all mad here. Pass the tea.
I talk to myself. I learned to do this from characters like Thomas Magnum, who talked to themselves on the TV. I aquired this habit before anyone explained to me that I shouldn't. Adults would say "DON'T DO THAT" and never offer up a shred of reasoning as to why it was wrong or harmful. So I ignored them.
I was twelve or thirteen when someone finally told me, "People will think you're crazy." By then it was too late to stop. I got better at pretending. The average person is so stuck on him or herself and their own personal dramas that they never notice a thing.
I've been telling myself stories for about...twenty-two years?...and they were always initially fanfiction, what we now consider fanfiction, in some form.
When I was five and struggling to master the vile instrument of torture known in common vernacular as a pencil, "fanfiction"--copying down the intro speeches and text of Zelda or the Ninja Turtles--kept me interested in ghastly handwriting lessons.
The way we write in English is excruciating left-handed. I don't know if it's the same for right-handed people or for other languages. I have a series of calluses on my left middle finger from my inability to hold a writing instrument the way a right-handed person can/should. Writing longhand hurts, it always has, and I tire quickly.
To sum up: fandom made my writing quasi-legible and gave me a place to try out ideas.
"Muses" is a loanword from fandom at large. I use it to refer to the characters I consistently recognize, who recur in my head and periodically "tell" me their stories in varying levels of internal audio clarity.
For me, muses are the same sort of voice as that "little voice in your head."
Right there! The one that just told you "What does she mean? I don't have a voice in my head! Maybe she has a voice in her head."
Your internal narrator, lovely. Mine simply speaks dialects or has accents.
I have one original character who "speaks" clearly to me (the cynical college boy), two transplants (Brin, and Baraka with a heavy edit job), and two MK fan-characters with loose, quasi-vocal identities (Brin and Koteth).
As it stands, Mileena, with whom I have been close for over a decade, is the only one with very clear, consistent diction patterns and word/action choice. I have discovered, to my eternal inconvenience, that I cannot make her do anything she does not want to do.
There are four of her in here, but they're all the same character with slightly different aspects; they can't "meet up" and "trade notes" in my head, because there's nothing different about them at the core.
I do not have, nor have I ever had, a human Mileena. Not out of prejudice; she simply never appeared to me as human. Even before I knew what she looked like she was inhuman, gholia, created-thing, not properly alive or properly souled the way her beautiful sister was. Clay and curses and stolen royal blood.
Baraka used to narrate to me, but I don't "hear" much from him anymore, and haven't really "heard" from the Shadows crew in general over the course of perhaps the last two years. They started to "go quiet" in late '05 and Mileena just started murmuring at me again a few weeks ago in rushed, jagged tangles, but the others are still "quiet".
My fan characters are laid-back, experimental sorts. They pop up to "correct" me if I'm about to do something they find too hideously out-of-character to bear, but are usually "quiet" by default.
Greed is not vocal; I get a sense of placement, a kind of "yes/no" pendulum-dowsing basic sense of what he will and will not do, will and will not say, but he has never "spoken" to me.
Kimbley "talks" to himself within the range of my hearing occasionally. He's "loudest" when I'm at school, and has no interest in "telling me" his story, the way Mileena does. He likes to make fun of the other students, and me, and then disappear again.
Everything and everyone else? I either observe them by "listening" to what the muses have to "say", or simply make up as I go along.
That does happen. I can actually formulate ideas by myself. It's just a far more painful and infinitely less easy way of doing things. XD
There you have it. Ask questions if you like, 'cause that's all I could think of.
This is the easiest kind of writing, an advanced game of find-the-word or fill in the blank. Read the rubrik, attend lectures or read the entrance requirements and perhaps a sample copy of the publication to understand what the teacher/publisher wants, and then give it to them.
As far as technical construction goes, it's always the same. "This (concept/idea/formula) works/does not work so well BECAUSE (insert reasons and back them up with facts)." That's all. You'll generally be better received if you have or can cultivate either a very techincally precise voice or a warmish cozy narrative tone.
It's like baking a cake or something similar, but with facts and/or experience-based opinions instead of flour. It's deceptively simple and tends to consume the bulk of my writing time, interest, and energy these days.
The above formula works well enough to get me published, if not purchased. I assume this means I need improvement (doesn't everyone? Constantly?) but am apparently barking up the correct tree.
Start with an idea. I've never not had an idea. "I don't know what to write" is a statement that puzzles me. I don't know how to write stuff that isn't blind alleys and dead ends much of the time, but I've never not known what to WRITE.
If your hands hurt you (mine do), get a computer. You don't even have to learn to type properly, though you'll be able to churn out more words faster, and thus find the route to a decent idea that actually WORKS faster, too.
That part of the process takes me a great deal of time. I'm always trying to do too much in too little space. I like to epic myself into a corner. I'll see a new scenario or fandom or character, and suddenly everything wants to be Lord of the Rings HUGEANTIC AND SWEEPINGLY MASSIVE.
I used to follow that blindly. That's where "Mirrorworld" and "Shadows" both came from. XD
These days, I basically wait for that urge to pass and let the ideas simmer.
For me, that stage is the hardest. It's torture. But it passes. It always passes. It typically takes about a week to a month, and then it's gone. I'm frequently left with an idea that works for a few thousand words. I go directly from the idea to the computer and sling it down. I don't want the idea to get cold or disappear or go wonky on me. There will come a time to improve it, but now is not that time.
As soon as the idea stops being painfully epic and starts to look like a manageable scenario-chunk, write it down immediately. Do not stop until you run out of scene and/or the character stops "talking". You want every shred of that idea. Capture it as soon as you can. You'll have more editing to do, but you'll also have more raw material to do it with.
My inner editor is a vicious bitch. I do not like dealing with her, and I make a point of never doing so with any given scene until that scene is finished. She's too voracious to accept waiting for the end of a 3-to-30k word chunk of several interlaced scenes/"the whole story". I used to try and make her wait until the end, the way they advise in all the books, and she ate whole reams of some of my better stuf in retaliation.
They'll tell you endlessly, "kill your darlings". One of the beauties of fanfiction is that you don't really have to. As long as you have decent grammar and one or two cool ideas, let 'er rip. Half the Internet won't even know the difference.
In all fairness, my shit really improved once I started going on "darling-killing" sprees. But it takes time, actually wanting to do it is definitely an acquired
Heh. XD
Sometimes, I get stuff that comes out finished all in one rush: Disbanded is probably my best example. But that's rare and somewhat lucky. I get between two and four of those a year, max.
My other stories that come out "whole" hover somewhere in the neighbor of 1,000 - 3,000 words. Drabbles and one-sentence fics represent solid effort on my part, and frequently require more drafting/editing than longer work. I'm not good at tightening the leash, shortening the output. I know I have that problem. I consciously work on it when I feed the inner editor.
It's unbelievably bastard hard to write a drabble that's exactly 100 words. Mine typically come out at 101, 103, or 107. Getting a pure drabble takes much editing and killing of darlings.
When I'm "on", when the writing is running from my fingertips without me having to push, I'll get between 500 and 900 words for an epic fic; that's generally a scene. My introductory sentences for any given scene are typically 6 words exactly. (I've noticed this in recent years.)
My hardest lesson in the actual drafting stage has been this: writing in the "on" state is best.
They tell you "don't wait to be inspired, don't wait for inspiration, or you'll never get anything done." This is both true and false. On a deadline, you obviously cannot wait for inspiration. In a fictional frame, you can't wait for it, or you'll be one of those writers who never updates, like me. I've found, however, that pushing ahead without waiting for it simply creates drivel, headaches, and MORE dead-ends and false starts to clean up and axe, and then you have to start over again anyway.
The solution is to get inspired. (See "inducing the 'on' state", three paragraphs down.)
"On" state is the closest thing living writers have to Nirvana. When I'm "on", I can feel it; the words just come, sometimes with alternate-word-choices already included, or the character is "talking" so fast I almost can't keep up. That's when I get the stuff that's clearest, cleanest, and best-formed in the initial draft itself.
Pushing the writing tends to backfire spectacularly, causing a waste of effort and resources that, if I had just waited for the "on" state, could have at least gotten the damn thing FINISHED faster. Perhaps it would have been a few days later, or a week later, but it would have come out solid and workable instead of utter shit that must be erased and redone.
You'll do a lot more erasing and redoing all around, no matter what stage you're at, if you have a Nazi inner editor like I do. On the other hand, having her around means I have a certain basic level of quality that TyPiNg LiEk DiZz and "lol i suk at sumeriez" couldn't compete with if its author's life depended on it. So there is a nice trade-off. I don't hate her; she's just not easy to work with most of the time.
AND NOW: The "on" state can be induced by some of the following: good music, a change of scenery--going to the bookstore or the park, or just standing in your backyard and looking around for a few minutes--ANYTHING other than the walls or tabletop you've been looking at the whole time you've been writing/typing, journalling first (paper or virtual), and other books and films.
Many well-respected authors will tell you that reading other fiction and/or watching films is a bad idea. It probably is, for original fiction. Personally, the "on" state is more important to me than whether or not I get sued in the future, so I disregard this maxim. Especially for writing fanfiction. That's why they're well-respected and I'm not. Oh fucking well. If their way worked for me, I'd use it.
A good alternative solution is to put on a documentary. I love the Animal Planet ones about the ocean. ^_^ Get up, step away from the writing, and watch the pretty pictures and soothing, drony voice until the coiled panic of "oh god, I'm not on, I'll never be on again, I can't write and everything I write sucks anyways" blurs and disappears into the background.
Other useful distractions from this mindset include hot showers and/or a wank. Booze is good for the idea stage but very, very, EXTREMELY bad for the writing stage and can numb or kill the "on" entirely.
The "on" state is hampered or killed entirely by the following: lack of sleep, dehydration, long commutes, sinus infections, and college.
The cure for lack of sleep is sleep. The cure for dehydration is water, juice, or celery. Note: alcohol does not improve dehydration. Sinus infections are cured by expensive pills that I cannot afford, and mitigated somewhat by Benadryl, which I can. The cure for long commutes is ownership of a car.
There is no cure for college. College is where BNFs go TO DIE.
*Ahem.*
My editing strategy is to take out all the extra articles first, starting with "a", because it's the shortest one, so it's frequently overlooked; sometimes that single keystroke can hoist the text up a full line, which, even in hypertext, helps with ease of reading.
Shorter lines are easier to read. The audience will generally absorb more faster and with better retention. So kill every "a" you can. Then kill his big brother, "the".
People have suggested killing "of" to me before, too, but I find that hard. It makes my sentence structures go wibbly.
I don't kill adverbs; I don't see the point. It's quite in vogue just now, though, apparently. <--Lol illustrative case. If it works for you, great, but don't expect me to do it.
Kill verbs. What I mean is, give them steroids. Here's a detective-novel sounding example: Use "slaughtered" for "killed" and "fled" for "ran". The word count is the same, but the picture's punched up. It is possible to go too far with that idea, but it doesn't hurt to try it on every third sentence or so, from a purely technical standpoint.
And my fingers hurt now, so I'm going to stop typing.
I was originally trying to get to "Outlining: Why I Don't Use It", but I have a hand cramp. XD
LOL ENTRY LENGTH = about 3,100 words. See? Told you.
Yes, Virginia, there are typos. I'm not fixing them. My hands hurt. *Whine whine snarl lick paws.*
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Date: 2007-11-04 05:35 am (UTC)Amen. I always wondered why my parents thought it was so horrible for me to talk to myself. It seemed that they were worried that I thought I was talking to another person. I still talk to myself. :)
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Date: 2007-11-04 05:06 pm (UTC)And ditto. ^_^
I mean, sometimes it's just my to-do list and stuff, but out loud, like "Okay, the Library is over here...Man, I want a soda...I've got to study this and this, blah blah" kind of things. But usually it's stories.
I can't always tell when I'm doing it, though. ^^;