Stuff you hate

[FaustWolf]

These are such big questions for artists! I've found myself somewhere between Lennis and Thought on this matter and I understand them both completely. Right as I was going into this class I was telling Thought and tushantin over email how perfect my artistic life was going during the summer, and *bam*! I hit my need to finish this degree again, and it knocked the wind right out of my sails. I was in quite the depression for a bit there.

The full truth is, I still do have specific, regular nights blocked out for writing -- but those must now go to a few fan projects that I owe deference to, because it's been a while since I was able to give them attention. Moreover, looking back, I realize I had some undue hubris over the summer, thinking my current, original-IP-pursuing-self knew better than the FaustWolf who existed back in 2010 and 2011. Truth is, for all the writing experience I've gained since then, I'm learning so much now that I delve back into the fan projects and explore my past self a little more, back before I got so tuckered out and "matured" in the working world. There are lessons sitting in the unfinished fan projects, so that's the real reason I say I have to put "IT" aside for a little while. There's no doubt I'll keep snatching moments to scribble dialogue backbones for "IT" on notebook paper, but I must see the fan projects to some conclusion before I can give "IT" the attention it deserves. I now know "IT" will be so much greater for it.

To sum up, I'm happy with my evolving artistic self, and that's what matters most. I only wonder what I'll be thinking about on Halloween, when I first meditated on this song way back in 1998. Will it be "IT" or the fan projects? I guess I'll have to see where the wave of inspiration takes me. I'll probably be handing out candy to little kiddies and my mind split evenly between both.

[utunnels]

I found I'm so easily addicted to video games. When this happens I hate to do anything else, but waiting for my interests to burn out.
Perhaps I really need some sort of schedule, but the depressing thing is I get only 3-4 hours free time every night.

[Boo the Gentleman Caller]

I would kill for 3-4 hours of free time a night, hahaha...

[Lennis]

In my experience, significant work can only be done piecemeal. I'd estimate it took George RR Martin around 600 hours of writing to produce Game of Throne: there's no way he did that in a single sitting. Further, I'd be buttons to bullion that it went through at least three drafts (probably closely to 6), each with a respectable break in between. We're looking at around a year and a half of full time work. Trying to mimic that only when you have large chunks of time just wont work.

The key to quality isn't having a huge chunk of time to work on things, but rather working on things consistently and going through multiple drafts. I'd be greatly surprised if there's a book on the market that had only one draft. Indeed, even just two would be incredibly amazing. This means, the first draft is going to be crap when compared to the final version. As such, there's little good in worrying about getting it absolutely right the first time. The biggest challenge, rather, is getting the thing hammered out and down on paper. THEN, when you know what you are working with, can you start crafting it into something of quality.

Six-hundred hours?  Are you serious?  I would think it would have taken him a lot longer, especially if he had multiple drafts.

You make a lot of good points, and I've heard a lot of other experts on the writing profession give similar advice.  The problem is that not all authors are created equal.  Some are so efficient and workman-like that they can churn out multiple novels in any given year, while others spend a lifetime working on their masterpiece before they feel it is even fit to read.  I think the difference between these two approaches is in how the author treats material that is sub-par.  For some people, just getting anything at all onto paper is an accomplishment, and they try to fashion a quality manuscript out of mounds of trash.  I have to say that I have never understood this approach.  If you have five pages of quality material that can be salvaged from 50 pages of crap, you are still left with 45 pages of crap that has to be fixed, and that is a considerable burden that only serves to drag the creative process through the mud.  Maybe there's some OCD going on here, but I cannot tolerate crap that is written by my own hand.  If a passage isn't working, I have to deal with it immediately until it does work.  You don't get better by putting off 'till tomorrow problems that need to be fixed as they happen.  I don't view a hastily written manuscript as any kind of accomplishment if quality was sacrificed in the name of progress.  From my perspective, a crappy draft just gives the author a lot of unnecessary extra work just trying to make sense of the garbage, let alone starting over to write the draft he should have written the first time.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you get in the habit of writing crap, you'll probably keep on writing crap.  That's why I don't put anything substantive to paper until I know I have the time and mentality to do it right.  After all, if your initial draft is of high quality, imagine how much better your final draft will be.  A writer that has planned things out well enough shouldn't need "throwaway" drafts.  A working draft and a final draft is all you really need, at least if you use word processors.  (I consider those separate from notes and test scenes that aren't written to narrative standards.)

As for productivity, one of the best pieces of advice I've heard (once I was in a place to understand it) was that one has to treat writing like a job. You can't get by if you skirt off on your job's duties, and you can't get by if you skirt off on your writing. It doesn't matter if you feel like going to your normal job and working, you still do it. And it doesn't matter if you feel "in the mood" to write or not, you still sit down and write. If you treat it like a hobby, it will ever only be a hobby. If you treat it like a career, though, then you just might make it one.

This is not a path I wish to tread, treating writing like a job.  A job is what you do every day, like it or not, to get the paycheck you need to put food on your table.  Love plays no part in that, and when your writing begins to reflect this workman-like detachment, you have lost a most important source of inspiration, and perhaps a desire for quality above the norm.  I've read my share of cookie-cutter books, and I wonder what might have become of those unremarkable stories had they been pursued with the zeal of a hobbyist rather than a career-author looking to make a quick buck.  Anything worth writing is worth writing well, or at least to the best of your abilities.  To that effect, it's best to start writing when you're reasonably well-rested and have no pressing concerns to distract you from your task.  Once you do start writing though, I've found that you shouldn't stop for anything until you have at least completed the section you intended to write, even if you grow tired from the effort.  Few things are more discouraging than forgetting a planned passage just because you had to take a nap, another reason you shouldn't start writing unless you're physically and mentally up to a session.  Your story demands the best from you, not merely what energy you have left to spare for it.

EDIT: I noticed that you indicated that you essentially have to write yourself into the story to really get going. A lot of writers are like that. However, if you write consistently (as in, every day at noon, sharp, you write for half an hour), you will be able to get into the story much faster. This takes time, though, to develop the needed "muscles" and habits. Furthermore, thinking about the story and what you want to accomplish that day really helps me hit the ground running. I don't have the narrative figured out, of course, but just knowing that "This character will be here, go there to meet with that other character, have a fight, banter, then run away" makes the days writing session go so much better (and it's easier to loose myself in it and write beyond my time limit, because then I am eager to get to the rest of what I planned for that day). When I'm not thinking about the story all day, then things really drag when I write.

I wish I could write for a half-hour every day at noon.  My work obligations won't allow it.  And I would take no joy or sense of accomplishment from such a short session anyway.  I would want to keep going.  And then work would get in the way.  And then dinner after that.  Imagine taking a lollipop from a three-year-old before he's through sucking it.  That's what I'm like after a writing session that's long enough to get some narrative ideas in my head but not long enough to write those ideas down in a coherent fashion.  Going to work in a bad mood is not conductive to good health.  I can relate to what you say about not having the narrative completely figured out and having a rough sequence outlined.  That's actually a joy because things can develop in a way you didn't initially plan on and end up working quite well.  As it turns out, there are few days when I'm not thinking about my story in some way, so we also have that in common.  But what I think about is usually how a scene plays out in dialogue, as it would in a film, rather than how it would read.  That last is not something I can daydream, and demands my undivided attention.

[Thought]

Lennis, I am curious: have you tried other methods of writing? If so, how long did you stick with them, what were your experiences like, and what did you produce?

To give some perspective along those lines, allow me to use myself as an example. I've been writing for 20 years. For the first 19 of those I thought I was a discovery writer. Then I decided to actually experiment with my writing, and started with outlining. Within a single writing session, I was convinced that I had been wrong all that time. Now, I absolutely love outline writing. That clearly doesn't work for everyone (Stephen King is the most discoveriest and most famous of discovery writers), but until I tried otherwise, I would have never known that it does for me. Of course, even knowing that I’m an outliner, I don’t really know yet where on the spectrum I lie. Still have to experiment.

That is what is really important. Working on developing yourself as a writer. The rest, well, it feels like you are giving excuses, Lennis. Really lame ones. The “Todd Akin” kind of lame. Maybe you aren’t, though. Maybe you’ve actually done your due diligence. Hence my above questions.

It might please you to know that my current project, the one that I’ve been treating like a job and working on every day (I’ve been loving it endlessly, by the way) is indeed crap. The rub there, though, is that it is crap because it’s really my first successful project. You wouldn’t like the first soup I ever made, either (seriously, there was something really really wrong with that thing). I’ve been learning hordes of things that I just didn’t get from a “everything must be perfect before I can move on” approach (which I also had 19 years of trying). My characters, for one, are much better. Because I am working with them every day, I really get to know them more than I ever got to know a character before (even characters I had worked on for five or more years). This book won’t be publishable, even after several revisions. It isn’t supposed to be. It’s supposed to teach me, so I can write better books later, and those will teach me how to write better still. If your stories demand your best, then you had best be sure that your best is damn well good enough, and the only way to get that to happen is hard work. Lovely, delightful, job-y work, but work nonetheless.

I wish I could write for a half-hour every day at noon.  My work obligations won't allow it.

As long as you work somewhere in the western world, your work obligations require it. Labor laws and all that. There are, of course, always exceptions (academic scientists are one, actually).

[Lennis]

The rest, well, it feels like you are giving excuses, Lennis. Really lame ones. The “Todd Akin” kind of lame.

I have to say that statement kind of irritates me.  I don't like it when people regard my honest observations about myself as excuses.  (I'm assuming you're taking issue with my statements about work and dinner.)  I wasn't expecting to be attacked over that, and I really wasn't expecting to be compared to Todd Akin.  That man is a fool who let his prejudices influence his judgement and his words, not to mention that he obviously didn't care how women would react to his "rape" comments.  I'm much more thoughtful in my approach to things.  How does one draw the line between honest self-reflection and outright whining?  I didn't think I was doing the latter.

You and I have been practicing creative writing for about the same amount of time, though I get the impression you've been doing it more consistently than I have.  Historically, I've worked in spurts, making a few efforts to start an original science-fiction project before things kind of just fell apart due to a less-than-solid grasp of where I wanted the story to go.  The three main characters were fairly well developed, but the world I put them in was not.  I wanted their world to be set in a believable 22nd century where they would have to deal with the legacies of what happened in the 21st - the collapse of the United States being but one of them.  As I've gotten older, I've had to adjust a lot of my assumptions on what a believable near-future would look like, both politically and technologically.  Since my last attempt at building that world, there has been a major worldwide economic crisis and the development of smartphones - neither of which I thought would happen in the late 2000's.  (One of my characters was using an arm-strapped device similar to a present-day smartphone in the year 2112, and was inferior to an Android in almost every way.)  I now follow geopolitical and technological developments from actual experts in those subjects, rather than trying to guess at them on my own.  It's a more mature approach that I hope will bear fruit one day.

As for how I approach writing itself, I leaned very much toward the discovery side of things in my early days.  I found the concept of outlining very cumbersome and limiting, in a narrative sense.  I found that my characters weren't being given room to stretch their wings and fly, never knowing what they were truly made of by sticking to a rigid script.  I wanted my work to be more than just an exercise.  By opening up the creative doors to the winds, my material was routinely better than what my classmates could produce.  Going the "discovery" route proved to be a boon to my characterizations and dialogue.  Plot was still a problem for me, but I didn't concern myself much with that since I wasn't writing novels at the time.  I didn't take outlining seriously until I started world-building with my science-fiction project.  Even then, I kept things loose just in case an unexpected solution to a plot issue showed up in the narrative.  Unfortunately, things always hung up in Chapter 4.  The foundation just wasn't strong enough to continue that version of the story.  The characters still live in my heart, but everything around them withered and died.  I simply wasn't ready to start the main manuscript.  I had already thrown three-plus chapters worth of material at the canvas, and nothing was sticking.  I decided I wouldn't throw anything else at that canvas until the foundation could support it, at least nothing pretending to be an actual narrative.  I don't like throwing away chapters.  I really don't.  Doing so makes me feel like more of a failure for letting it happen.

You and I seem to take diametrically opposite positions to experimentation in writing.  You look on everything as an exercise.  It doesn't matter if it's good or not.  Anything you write is a learning experience not meant to be taken seriously any other way.  I take the view that everything you write in full-narrative has to be taken seriously with the end-game (publishing) in mind, or it is just wasted effort.  I'm a little confused about your assertion that your current project is crap because it's your first successful project.  I'm assuming you mean "finished" or nearly-finished, because crap, as you call it, can hardly be called a successful project.  If you're learning something, that's great, and I don't discount the benefits of learning as you go.  But saying that "This book won’t be publishable, even after several revisions. It isn’t supposed to be. It’s supposed to teach me, so I can write better books later, and those will teach me how to write better still." kind of makes me feel sorry for your story.  Does it not deserve better than that?  I'm not suggesting that what you write now will have the same level of polish as something you write 20 years from now, but why not go all-out and see what your best is capable of now?  You might be better than you think.  I always put forth my best effort before posting one of my chapters.  It might not be perfect, but a lot of published books I read aren't perfect either.  I take heart from that, because I know I can make my stuff just a little bit better for the final draft because I approached things from the start with the final goal in mind.  I don't stop learning because I took that mentality.

I recognize that every writer approaches things differently.  I'm not trying to belittle your preferred methods.  For me, developing my skills as a writer means tackling the manuscript meticulously until it is as good as I know how to make it before showing it to other people.  That way the quality can only get better when problems are pointed out and corrected.  It's also important to understand your limitations.  If you don't write good material in sub-hour sessions, it's probably better to allot yourself more time for writing than plugging away piecemeal hoping you get better at it.  My piecemeal efforts have never produced good results, and usually necessitate complete rewrites of the offending material to fix the problems.  I don't look at that as time well spent.

I could go into more detail in how I approach my Chrono Trigger novel series and how my habits have evolved in recent years, but this post is getting a bit longish, so I think I'll pause here for tonight.  (Maybe we should take this to the writer's thread?)

[alfadorredux]

Every writer has a different process. I'm one of those that finds it useful—indeed, I would go so far as to say it's necessary to maintaining what passes for my sanity—to at least try to write every day. Of course I end up discarding some text. That's part of my process, and I've learned to live with it. Sometimes I have to write a chunk of the wrong thing before I can come up with the right thing.

Nor is Thought in bad company when it comes to having a manuscript that he thinks isn't publishable: most published writers have a "trunk novel" stashed away at the bottom of a drawer somewhere. (Or Thought may just be overestimating the quality of what gets submitted to publishers. (Read that entire post. Including the comments. Seriously.))

I'm short on time, so I'll stop there.

[Thought]

Alfador, those are a lot of comments! But a wonderful article. It’s always really interesting to hear from and editor or agent perspective. I’m fairly sure that my first submitted story was rejected because of #2 on that editor’s 14 list (to be fair, I thought at the time that it fit the magazine’s style… then I read more into the genre and realized I had written something totally different than what I thought I wrote).

Lennis, to note, the Todd Akins part was supposed to be so over the top as to be disarming. I had meant it as the classic pairing of two ridiculous opposites. However, it clearly didn’t work, so I apologize about that.

Anywho, I think you are taking most my comments far too one-dimensionally. Yes, everything is a learning experience and must be perceived in that light, but it is still a full narrative to be taken seriously with the end-game in mind. The two aren’t really separate. We do, however, have different goals in mind. Mine is to become a publishable author. It sounds like yours is to produce a publishable book.

To use an analogy, I might want to run a mile in 6 minutes, but I am under no illusions that I have the ability to do so right now. I would have to train. While that require doing my best each time, if I never run a mile to begin with, I’ll never be able to run a 6 minute mile. That first mile I run will be horrible. But if I run that first mile, then run a second, then a third, I’ll improve.  But if I want to run a “perfect mile” by making sure every single step is perfect…

Anywho, I’ll probably just annoy if I try to harp on that anymore. Onwards!

There are a variety of reasons I call my current project crap. The first is the shock value. It’s probably better described as unpublishable.

Second, it’s a comparatively mundane epic fantasy. I wanted it to be this way: I want to try my hand at a lot of different genres, and decided to start with epic fantasy. There are plenty of creative touches in it, but I wanted to try to write to genre norms before I start trying to add large twists. Have to know the rules before you can break them, you know? Anywho, the end result is that it’s not a cookie cutter but also not cutting edge. I’m alienating both readerships, and thereby there isn’t much of a market for it.

Additionally, it has a lot of problems of the exact sort that I don’t currently have the skills to properly address. Pacing, for example, was never an issue I encountered seriously until I started making significant progress towards the completion of a book, simply because I had never gotten far enough for book-scale problems to arise. I’m getting better, but it’s crazy-pants for me to think I’ll master pacing by the time the draft is done. No sense spinning my wheels about it even before then.

Yes, it’s a shame that this first book has to be bad, but the thing is, as Alfador noted, everyone’s first book is bad. Overnight successes are backed by decades of failed attempts. I really like the ideas in my book, but since I want to be a career author, that means I also need to practice coming up with new (and better) ideas. And, to note, the more I practice, the better I get (yes, creativity is a learned attribute).

Besides, nothing is ever wasted (well, unless you delete it, which is another reason not to edit as you go). After a few books are under my belt, I can come back to this one, take the good ideas, rework them, and use them again.

Anwyho again!

You mentioned you used to be all discovery, and now outline a little. But I am still curious, have you tried consistent writing sessions (even if they are small)? And if so, for how long did you stick with it? While every author has their own method, every author still has to figure out what works best for them. I’m curious in how you figured out what works for you.

But yes, I suppose we should take this to a writing thread.

[Lennis]

Alfador, those are a lot of comments! But a wonderful article. It’s always really interesting to hear from and editor or agent perspective.

Indeed, that was an informative and amusing read.  (I'll have to bookmark that page so I can look through that huge backlog of comments more thoroughly.)  I can only hope I am able to maintain some level of objectivity and decorum when it comes time for me to submit something.

Lennis, to note, the Todd Akins part was supposed to be so over the top as to be disarming. I had meant it as the classic pairing of two ridiculous opposites. However, it clearly didn’t work, so I apologize about that.

I should apologize for that little outburst.  I get very defensive if I feel I'm being criticized after opening myself up.  It brings to mind a less-than-pleasant e-mail correspondence I had with a friend a few years back that basically wrecked that friendship.  I never opened up to that person again, and the relationship faded to nothing.  On my list of regrets, that one is in the top ten.

Anywho, I think you are taking most my comments far too one-dimensionally. Yes, everything is a learning experience and must be perceived in that light, but it is still a full narrative to be taken seriously with the end-game in mind. The two aren’t really separate. We do, however, have different goals in mind. Mine is to become a publishable author. It sounds like yours is to produce a publishable book.

You nailed it on the head.  In recent years my attitudes toward writing have changed, in that I believe a story is more important than the man who writes it.  Men are flawed, pathetic creatures that are often remembered more for the things they got wrong in life than the things they got right.  I don't particularly want to be remembered as anything more than a caretaker for ideas put into a narrative form.  I view a story as a living breathing thing of potential perfection that we human beings nurse to a level of growth where it can take on a life of its own.  We are only caretakers of that which is better than us.  We can either interpret the true form of that story correctly, in as much as is possible, or watch our charge wither and die if we get it wrong.  I suppose my tackling of Chrono Trigger has made me more inclined to this way of thinking since it is clearly something that already exists, just not in as complete a form as it could be.  Considering everything I have to do to get this story right, (retelling the canon tale, expanding the world and the characters within, creating two new time-periods to adventure in, revamping and resolving Chrono Cross for the endgame, and staying true to the spirit of the original material) my skills as an author will be well on the way to where they need to be for me to create a completely original novel should I succeed.

To use an analogy, I might want to run a mile in 6 minutes, but I am under no illusions that I have the ability to do so right now. I would have to train. While that require doing my best each time, if I never run a mile to begin with, I’ll never be able to run a 6 minute mile. That first mile I run will be horrible. But if I run that first mile, then run a second, then a third, I’ll improve.  But if I want to run a “perfect mile” by making sure every single step is perfect…

I'm not sure that's the greatest of analogies.  Making sure every step is perfect would be counterproductive, as only the first 20 seconds worth of steps is worth remembering for purposes of technique.  The rest is just repetition and knowing yourself well enough to know what pace you should maintain.  Besides, I would argue that the way you breathe is much more important than the way you run, but I'm just being annoying here.

So your project is delving into several different genres?  I'm beginning to see your way of thinking.  Each genre has a set of rules that are difficult to break away from.  Readers are fickle and expect certain things, and going against the grain of their expectations can be dangerous.  As an example, there was a Star Trek paperback I read some time ago that violated my expectations so completely that I never read another book written by this author.  As a fan of Star Trek I expected high adventure, ethical dilemmas, smart characters, perhaps some space battles, and most importantly: that this fictional world is a far more enlightened place than the one I myself live in.  What I got instead was a preachy treatise on psychology by the author and a set of characters so dysfunctional that they belonged in modern-day group therapy.  Reading that wasn't fun.  It was work.  I still wonder how that Psych 101 textbook got past the editors and onto a bookshelf.  I never would have cleared it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "consistent writing sessions".  I'm guessing you mean a series of sessions where I just write things down without thinking about it too much.  If so, I'll concede I did that very little, and usually only as part of a formal assignment in creative writing class.  I got nothing out of such exercises except a sore hand, when I was able to write anything at all.  It's just not in my nature to take shots in the dark on paper.  The chaos in my mind is difficult enough to deal with.  If I had to manage chaos on paper on top of that in my head, I'd never write a coherent thought.  Some people need to see that chaos written down to know what to do with it.  I can already see the chaos in my head, except written chaos is far less malleable than disjointed thoughts.  It's actually easier for me to make sense of developing narrative in my head than on paper, because what's on paper is more difficult to change into something I can work with.  This is only referring to my initial narrative process, when I'm actually crafting the story on my viewscreen piece by piece.  What I have then isn't chaos by my definition, but a working draft that represents the first out of four stages of quality for a manuscript.  It is from that where I can move out of my head more and make reasoned adjustments on what is actually written.  Scrapping problem paragraphs isn't that uncommon at this stage, but I very rarely have to scrap entire scenes.  It's mostly dealing with technique and form, rather than figuring out what shape the story should take.  In most cases I've already done that, in part because the original game gives me a path to follow.

My full writing process will take some time to explain, so I'll move the rest of this discussion to the writer's thread.

[alfadorredux]

I should probably mention in passing that part of the reason I recommended reading the comments is that a surprisingly high percentage of the commentors are successful published authors. So that thread isn't just one editor's discussion of slush, but that of several industry professionals.

[skylark]

Okay, slightly off-topic.

What the hell happened with the forums for the past few days?

I hadn't been able to log in at all until today. Did anybody else have the same trouble?

It seems like it's okay now, but still. Thought my router crapped out on me or the site got hacked or something...

[alfadorredux]

Judging from what I was seeing at the top of the pages for most of that time, the forum was having one of its periodic cases of the cache-related hiccups. It seems to happen a couple of times a year. Dunno what the cause is, but fixing it seems to require that Ramsus reset/stop and restart/clean out something.

[skylark]

Judging from what I was seeing at the top of the pages for most of that time, the forum was having one of its periodic cases of the cache-related hiccups. It seems to happen a couple of times a year. Dunno what the cause is, but fixing it seems to require that Ramsus reset/stop and restart/clean out something.

Huh. So this is normal, then?

Well, not normal, but you get what I mean.

[Sajainta]

Not "normal" per se, but like alfadorredux said it does happen a few times a year.

[utunnels]

Caught a cold  so couldn't sleep well last night. Every 1 or 2 hours I woke up and drank some water to wet my throat. So now I'm feeling very drowsy and my nose and eyes are like burning.