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Feb. 7th, 2005 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stakebaitThank you, whoever nominated my story Charades for the Angel Without Wings awards!
You know what the problem with “sucky first drafts” is? Second drafts. I recently read![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
truepenny on habits of thought that no longer work, and am now wondering if the issue I had with writing workshops was a bit beside the point. They seemed to think every story can be fixed and every story needs fixing, whereas I wanted to leave well alone with the best and scrap the worst and start over. But while I still think they fell down on teaching when to revise, they do teach how to revise. If I’d just gone into it for what I wanted out of it and ignored the rest, I might be better at this now. I’m okay at tidying up the mechanics, but the Big Rethink that might save a fair but flawed? Not so much.
Its fine enough to just toss a short story that’s not working and try another one, but it’d be maddening to do over and over with novels after a hundred pages or so. And since part of the reason I’ve been trying short stories is to practice for novels, I really should try to adopt a plan that will scale up.
Which means I’ve also got to break myself of the habit of editing a story through from the beginning to wherever I left off each time before I add anything new. This takes long enough with the last few scenes of a 10,000 word story – at 100,000 it’ll be completely unworkable. And it also means that the beginning of any story of mine is edited many times more than the end. OTOH, I am superstitiously reluctant to mess with anything that's working at all.
You know what the problem with “sucky first drafts” is? Second drafts. I recently read
truepenny on habits of thought that no longer work, and am now wondering if the issue I had with writing workshops was a bit beside the point. They seemed to think every story can be fixed and every story needs fixing, whereas I wanted to leave well alone with the best and scrap the worst and start over. But while I still think they fell down on teaching when to revise, they do teach how to revise. If I’d just gone into it for what I wanted out of it and ignored the rest, I might be better at this now. I’m okay at tidying up the mechanics, but the Big Rethink that might save a fair but flawed? Not so much. Its fine enough to just toss a short story that’s not working and try another one, but it’d be maddening to do over and over with novels after a hundred pages or so. And since part of the reason I’ve been trying short stories is to practice for novels, I really should try to adopt a plan that will scale up.
Which means I’ve also got to break myself of the habit of editing a story through from the beginning to wherever I left off each time before I add anything new. This takes long enough with the last few scenes of a 10,000 word story – at 100,000 it’ll be completely unworkable. And it also means that the beginning of any story of mine is edited many times more than the end. OTOH, I am superstitiously reluctant to mess with anything that's working at all.
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Date: 2005-02-08 03:06 pm (UTC)Basically, I don't mind wasting the time writing junk. What I don't want to do is waste the idea, because if it's an idea for something as time consuming as a novel, I'm already in love with it.
Plus it's hard for me to believe in the freedom of sucky first drafts when I know my track record for unsuckifying in rewrite is so limited. The better my salvage skills become, the more I'll be able to relax into the reality of "you can always fix it later." That's the hope, anyway.
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Date: 2005-02-08 05:08 pm (UTC)Hmmmm. If there were enough of us interested, I wonder if we could get a group together to do it online, and then go hunting for a teacher -- an editor might be as good or better than a more experienced writer for that kind of thing.