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[stakebait]

Thank 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 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.

Comments

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

*nods* Well a class on how to outline wouldn't hurt me any. I don't bother for short stories, but again, trying to scale up. I've got a top level outline for my novel, but it doesn't go scene-by-scene, and I'm not sure whether I really can outline to that amount of detail in advance -- though I do know that figuring out what has to be on-staged and what can be off staged is part of this skill I'm trying to develop, so that I don't have to flail at the end of every scene until I intuit what the next should be.