And then came a day shortly following all that stuff wear I absolutely suck! I can't believe I thought this stuff was good just a few days ago.
OMG, you wrote something. That's fantastic. We can be a bit rusty when we start actually writing again, but the main thing is to start. And then love it or hate it continue until completion. Rooting for you, my friend.
No, I haven't written more yet, but the ideas are swirling. I'm just talking in general. I've been on the yo-yo of thinking something is really good, and then suddenly thinking it's garbage. In fact I went back and read my latest version the other night and it's actually way better than I remembered it being. And now the ideas are lining up. Sometimes you just need some time away from it.
I have to disagree with your choice of terminology here. If it's not finished it is a work in progress. When it stops progressing then it is nothing. There are times you run out of gas with a story, and need to let it sit while you recharge. When you come back you may decide it is crap and toss it, or find what you need to move it forward. In the end it comes down to you and your choices.
I've got a whole bunch of unfinished stories from my attempts at writing the August 2023 prompt "Solace". Wrote so many stories back then and hated every single one before I settled for one 2 days before the deadline. Went back a few days ago to check these unfinished stories for the fun of it. Shockingly, I thought that they were... good? I mean, some of the things I wrote genuinely shocked me. The stories are far from complete. They're mostly a bunch of premises with no middle or end. Maybe I can slowly adapt the premise of these stories to another prompt and finish them someday. But this is exactly what I was talking about. Put the damn story down and look at it with fresh eyes later. It helps.
Really each of mine so far have been exploratory, trying to find the right way in. Working out character interactions and ways of presenting them, etc. As we talked about before @ps102 —I keep trying beginnings until I hit one that has what I call The Flow, meaning things are working well and the words are flowing out of me nicely. This story is taking more attempts than usual, plus I've done a lot of freewrites and practice scenes. It's because I'm trying to work at a higher level than I have before and I need to find my footing. Also because I've been learning so much—I need to wait until this intense self-education phase is over and let things absorb and digest for a while before I launch on the actual writing.
Sometimes I like to read what I wrote out loud, usually the dialogue. Do the words you wrote sound natural coming out of your mouth? Does the dialogue/character's internal dialogue sound like something a real person would say? Does it sound good when you say it with the emotions that you're going for? When describing something, does it feel like you're spending a little too much time describing it or not enough time? Etc., Of course, we can often be our own worst/best critic so maybe have a trusted friend proof read it for you.
Here's what it is—when I wrote the original Beastseekers stories, and then the Tony and Kurt stories after them, it took like 10 to 12 shorts before I really found the characters and story situations. When that happened I was able to nail them down and write much better about them. I guess I'm trying to reach that point—get the awkward early stage out of the way where you're still finding everything.
I have always been my own worst critic. I won't even begin to tell you how many times I have written stories, decided I hated the way I wrote them and deleted them. Now I wish I hadn't...some of them were rough, sure, but they had promise if polished. Now I keep abandoned things on my google drive in little folders so when I get the urge to go back to them, I still have them. I still have a hard time sharing my work, not because I am afraid of criticism, I actually enjoy that, but because I feel that my work isn't good enough.
I'm learning to trust my instincts. I'm not to a point where I don't want feedback yet, but if something isn't working for me, it ends up not working for the beta reader/critiquer/contest judge/whatever. Every once in a while, I'm totally blindsided by a criticism, but I try to weigh it against my own instincts and sense of personal style, which I'm fairly proud of most of the time. I do have my moments of crushing self-doubt, but I'm getting better at shutting that shit down. My writing isn't perfect. I'm not even ready to start sending most of it out, yet, but I'm getting there. I have one flash piece and a poem I'm officially shopping around, but I just got started with that. I knew the flash piece was the best I'd written while I was writing it, and most of the judges in the contest it won (a friendly contest on a forum) basically told me not to change a word. I did anyway, because of course I did. It needed tweaks. Still, it was more evidence of what I was pretty sure of already, that I know when it's right, and I know when it's wrong. I've entered that same monthly contest three times since, and I more or less predicted the results each time, including the time I knew the piece would be divisive and received two perfect scores and an abysmal one. Anyway, I suppose none of that really constituted advise, but all of that to say, I totally understand your stance on feedback. I think I'll get there myself eventually. I still crave validation, I guess, but I do believe in trusting your instincts. The only pseudo advice I can think of is to look to the pros. I read (audiobook) a ridiculous number of books. I often justify something to myself in my writing that I'm unsure of by comparing it to an example. I think, "If Stephen King did it, I'm allowed to do it, too." or "It was good enough for Chuck Palahniuk. It's good enough for me." I'm not comparing my work or my craft level to theirs, and I certainly don't want to be derivative. I just take solace in knowing that I'm not alone when I climb out on a limb. When you're not sure about a choice, see if you can think of a similar choice that worked out for someone.
I was just having a discussion via PM about the dreaded "rules," and why the great writers break them all the time while students aren't allowed to. It's because they understand writing and the rules well enough to know when and how to break them effectively. When students break them it's usually because they just don't know them, or at intermediate levels because "Well, X author breaks that one all the time." The thing to pay attention to is how did they make it work. That might be difficult to see unless you understand writing as well as they do. Of course it might just be intuitive for them, and possibly you're already a good enough writer to do it intuitively as well. And it can also be tricky to trust to beta readers, because many of them were educated in 'the Rulez' and haven't moved beyond them, and aren't aware that the job of a writer is to grow beyond the need for them.
When I first got here and posted my first attempt at The Beastseekers, I was fulll of piss and vinegar. I actually hadn't written anything for about a decade, but had been reading a lot. And when I started writing that first Beastseekers draft, I tried all kinds of crazy advanced things. It was all intuitive, I hadn't yet learned much about any rules beyond what I learned in grade school, about grammar and syntax etc. And as I said two posts back on this thread, when I got feedback I did searches to look into the things people were telling me about. That's when I first became aware of some of the rules I had been breaking. I did understand that what I was attempting was kind of crazy and advanced stuff, but in some cases I wasn't aware of specific rules. So I started my massive self-education spree, and gradually I found more advanced ways to approach things. That's when I discovered things like directly and indirectly reported thoughts and dialogue, and some of the deeper aspects of POV I had never run across before. Sometimes it turned out I had managed to break certian rules rather well, but in some cases I had simply committed crimes against good writing. So I dove in and studied more and kept trying things until I felt I knew how to break those rules, though there are definitely some that I still don't.
I feel like I walk the line between educated and intuitive. I think you need both. There's always more to learn, of course, but when I came back to writing after a decade break, I studied up on what I wanted to know. Some of it, I'm not interested in, though, honestly. I'd rather get a feel for plot and story by absorbing tons of literature than by memorizing method and writing to fit a form. I wrote my outline without knowing the "proper" story beats, but I'm told they're in there by people who have studied the formulas. The number one compliment I get on it is that it's a page-turner. People have trouble putting it down. I don't want to mess that up by writing to someone else's idea of an outline. I know it works for some people, but many of my favorite writers never use the methods, and I yes, I do think I see the hows and whys. I have work to do, but I'm coming along.
Oh yeah, I think that's true for all of us. Definitely for me. Intuition can cover a lot of ground, and it improves as you read more and write more, but it can still have holes in it that need to be filled through education.
My approach to that has been to study many different methods of outlining and story structure. I think if someone only studies one they can be stuck in it and not have other options. I apparently didn't pick up on story structure until I started to study it.
Personally, I think the concept of rules for writing is based on a faulty orientation, suggestive that there's a formula that's correct or optimum, from which the writer can deviate when good enough, and the notion that good writers know how and when to break it. I prefer to think of writing as a set of skills that can be developed, using intuition, study, even instruction. The talented, gifted and accomplished writer deepens and broadens that set of skills amd has more to apply when forming the written work. Recently, there was a discussion over on another thread about Grapes of Wrath. In my opinion, there are parts of that book that simply cannot work. One of the rules is that if you introduce a turtle in the first few pages, that turtle should shoot somebody by chapter three (smiley). It doesn't even re-appear. So, why did the turtle cross the road? Because John Steinbeck saw it as a useful metaphor for the story he was telling. Steinbeck's very highly skilled and gifted. The turtle works and, in his hands, I'm rooting for the little guy. His inclusion is merited because Steinbeck has the range of skills to make it so; he's good enough to do pretty much whatever he wants to tell his story. We all try ways to acquire and develop skills according to our own priorities and interests. @Xoic, while many members, myself included, appreciate and benefit from your knowledgeable take on writing skills, the idea of a deep dive on POV, for me, is as attractive as a deep dive on a prostate exam. That's not meant to diminish your approach, more that it couldn't work for me. More specific to the thread, part of the reason I jumped straight into submitting work, regardless of whether or not I'm ready, is to ensure I can't open the laptop some day and delete everything because I've decided it's all shit.
I appreciate some members' more scholarly approach and it's a treat to read about for sure, but the method is not personally for myself either. I'm prone to procrastination so I've gotten the ratio of research to practise back to front with many other pursuits in the past. Prescriptive instruction is best as a pinprick compared to activity (mountains of hours spent doing the thing or exercises pertaining), again at least for myself.
Terrible, I'm never satisfied with what I do. I have no self-esteem, and I never like anything I write. I always strive to improve, I do it for me. There are days when I read what I wrote and I don't recognize myself. How is it possible that that beautiful text is my work.
