And I just realized today that this explains my current relationship to my writing. When I started out, writing was easy and fun. I'd bang stuff out, quickly and gleefully revise it, and send it out to markets -- and promptly start collecting piles of form rejections. Many stories got trunked in the process, but that was okay, because there were always many more to take their place. And some of them even sold -- two to a pro mag, a few to decent semi-pros, and a lot more to really small mags. Nowadays, I'm much more careful about what I write. Rather than say, "Aha! I have a kernel of an idea, so I'm going to start writing to see what happens!" I instead let the idea simmer for months, jotting notes down whenever a new bit occurs to me. A good 3/4 of the ideas never get turned into stories, and those that do are written slowly and laboriously in a process that is never all that much fun. But they mostly sell, and to decent semi-pro markets to boot. It's been a while since I sold to a market that I later came to regret.
So, just like with yoga, now that I'm better at writing, it's harder. What ever happened to the glee? The wild abandon? The writing binges? Why did I have to lose that as my skills improved? I realize that part of this is that I've lost a certain naiveté about the process, but does naiveté have to equal happiness?
I need to find a way to marry skill and abandon in my brain. I want to write with that same glee and speed that I had back in the beginning, but I want to produce stories at or above my current quality level. I'm just not sure how to go about doing this.
I want writing to get easier as I get better. Is that too much to ask?
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jenwrites- Jennifer Pelland
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Well, I don't know about that, but. :) Back when I was studying cello seriously, I noticed that meaningful progress isn't like a slope, but like a series of brick walls. Things just seem harder and harder and no progress seems to be made, perhaps for a matter of years, and everything is frustrating and you become increasingly dissatisfied; and then suddenly within two weeks you see all the improvement of those years of frustration-- and it's incredibly exhilarating. When I'm struggling I like to think of the brick wall and have faith that suddenly I'm going to break through it, and then start racing to the next one. And if I'm neither struggling nor dissatisfied, I've turned away from the wall I should be facing.
Sorry, that sounds a bit new-age-y, but it was my experience. I don't know if it applies to writing, but I think it should?
Anyhow, thanks for the food for thought!
Now I am lucky to get a novel manuscript out a YEAR. When it's done, it's a hell of a lot better. The process is slower, more painstaking, a bit frustrating--but infinitely better.
It reminds me of an episode of Friends (not a huge fan, but my eldest daughter was.) Did you ever see the one when Phoebe goes running with Rachel? Phoebe, to Rachel's embarrassment, runs like a happy child, waving her arms like windmills, and her feet slapping pavement as if she were wearing clown shoes. It was the sheer abandon of running without the acceptable form, pace, clothing. It was just RUNNING. Did she look like an idiot--well, yeah. And that's the thing right there.
Writing okay at a clip is like chocolate milk. Writing WELL is like good wine. I think you got it right--it's a maturity thing.
I still wish there were a way to get that wine down faster. If I want to have any hope of being a working writer, then I'll have to learn to produce rough drafts and polished revisions so much quicker than I'm doing now. I look at the output of the Stonecoast gang and am awed. Maybe I need to get a new year's resolution of writing a new short story a month and finishing up a new novel by the end of the year. I just need to figure out if those goals will kill the rest of my life.
ETA: And no, I didn't see that episode of Friends because I avoided that show like the plague. Anything marketed as, "You must watch this! It's for people just like you!" fails miserably on me, especially when the "people just like you" are anorexics living in fabulous New York apartments. Nope. Nothing like me.
Edited at 2007-11-19 12:17 pm (UTC)
But then you have to factor in that by the time the beginner moves to intermediate or advanced, she's now got some bad habits in her technique, and they won't go away until she breaks the moves down to their component parts, finds where the bad habits originated, and laboriously works to re-train her brain into doing it the right way.
Writing may be the same way, when we start we have ap retty low bar for what we think "good" is, then we learn more and more about writing, what's already been written, and how the business end works, and we find ourselves being very careful about what we're willing to sink the effort (the effort to write "good" stories) into.
My 2 cents.
This is clearly something I need to think about some more.
In my experience?
Yes. It just keeps getting harder and harder and harder.
Fortunately, your skills expand so you can handle the hardness of it.
In any case, it's a great post.
And yeah, I think there's some sucking up and knuckling down my near future. I may just need to bully my way through a couple of quickly-written shorts to prove to myself that writing doesn't have to be ponderous and overly-planned. The trick is to come up with ideas that don't hinge upon tons of character development, which has been my real sticking point of late.
What has worked for me is to intentionally break my rhythm. When I start slowing down (like spending two hours to complete 200 words), I try pounding out a flash fiction, something under 1,000 words that is a complete story. The one-sitting story seems to loosen me and tells me it's okay to write "below standard."
Anna Lamott called this "shitty first drafts," which I have to remind myself are fine to do, and sometimes necessary. The search for the first words to be the right words bogs me down.
I see this as saying that sometimes you just need to clear out the logjam (drainscum, gutblock, constipation, pineapple) of bad words and new clean stuff will come.
And, if it's crap then you can *definitely* make it better. Definitely.
- yeff
I do agree that a story needs a solid backbone. It's what I try to understand before I really get going. Beginning, end, stops along the way. It's like planning a road trip and then I start driving. And I get distracted. And I linger. And I stop for a soda, or a snack.
I definitely agree on the "it just gets harder" aspect. I feel like I'm in a decent place with my writing, but if I want to get better (and move to where I want to be) it's going to be difficult. It's going to be a challenge. It's going to be hard.
I guess that aspect is what makes it worth the effort.
- yeff
But I did pull off a one-sitting story recently. Mind you, it was mostly cribbed off of the back of a bottle of cough syrup. But still!
"Commonly, students' ability to see their errors and technical failings increases faster than their ability to correct them. Then the instructor faces the problem of discouraged students who believe they are actually getting worse through training rather than better....An analogy that may help the intermediate student is that of 'carving a cube into a sphere'. Training is the process of chopping off corners. Initially, the corners are large and easy to see--as is progress. Later, each corner cut off reveals three new corners, albeit smaller ones. This process is endless, and while
an advanced student may appear to others of lesser experience to be a
perfect sphere, the individual is often painfully aware of the many corners that still need polishing."
--Elmar T. Schmeisser, "The University Dojo" in _Martial Arts Teachers on Teaching_, Carol A. Wiley, ed.
This is the second year I am participating in Nanwrimo, but it is my third novel and while I am enjoying writing it, I have noticed that it is a bit more difficult than it was previously.
Oh and I have to ask. The second tag line on your journal...are you a duran duran fan?
Hells yeah! I've only seen them twice in concert -- once when I was 15, once when I was 35. The creepy thing the second time was realizing that I was the same age as my parents were when I saw them the first time.
My LJ is littered with lyrics from them. :)
I haven't had a chance to get my hands on the new album yet, though I have heard the songs that JT worked on and they aren't that bad. What disturbed me more was that they worked with Timbland.
And when I saw them on the Astronaut tour, they had the back-up guitarist playing. Is it me, or does Andy look like he crawled into a bag of heroin during his decade or so off from the band? It makes me think that his recent "illnesses" were rehab-related.
I always thought Andy looked like he crawled out of something that wasn't too pleasant.
Sorry for gushing on about DD. Everyone here looks at me like I am crazy when I even mention the group. Don't get that many opportunities to share a fangirl moment.
And yes, I never understood Andy's appeal. But man, did things go drastically wrong with his face while he was away from the band.
Confidence has a wonderful way of making things easier, for one thing.
Also, as you completely internalize things, it does become easier.
I think the thing to do is seize upon the flashes of glee that come now... and I wager you'll see that said glee derives from the coming together of things to create some better than you could ever do when you were an ignorant wannabe.
Where are you, glee?
Perhaps I should check under the sofa.
You know, I used to write about characters that I either wanted to play, or that I had crushes on. So, of course, they were very Mary Sue-ish. But I was emotionally invested in the stories. There's got to be a way to get some of that back without delving back into Mary Sue.
Like vanilla and chocolate.
Sodom and Gamorrahh (sp?).
And that's essentially what I'm doing in my current revision of Chameleon. And what I did when I revised "Brushstrokes." The trouble with both is that I didn't recognize the Mary Sue/Mary Sue's boy toy problems until *after* I showed the MS to the writing group. Urgh.