I've lost the ability to "lose myself"

I think good writing is at least as much skill-of-execution as quality-of-inspiration. And I suspect (especially reading @BayView's comments above) that part of the growing process is coming to see as much joy in the skill-of-execution.

My father-in-law, now 97, was a commercial artist who painted in his spare time. He painted only scenes that moved him - landscapes, mostly. If you complimented his work, he would go on and on, talking about it. But he didn't talk about how dramatic a view it was of the mountain goat peering over a cliff down into a wooded valley. He would enthuse about the technique he'd used in painting the forest of pine trees, the glint of the sun off the cliff, the shadow thrown by the goat. He took pride in his craft.

So should we.

 

That moment when you realize rules and writing as a popularity contest are like octane to James Patterson -_-

 

Haha! He never replied though, so alas, the post was never edited!

 

I think it's their night-time over there...he's Australian!

 

I get what you're saying, Ed, but sometimes the craft can take over the heart. I feel that's happened to me, to some extent. It's the heart that makes me love my story and want to write it. I lose that, and there isn't really any point in honing the craft. I need to get it back. Maybe I've just been working too hard for too long on editing, that I've shifted into what feels like permanent edit mode.

 

That might well be the case, Jan. I haven't written anything in the past couple of months at all, and I think it's because there is a different mindset to editing, querying, etc. I've been submerging myself in reading, which I figure will get me back to writing mode. And I think it's working, as new ideas are starting to occur to me.

 

I've never understood the apparent assertion that one can't write with passion and heart AND write to attract a particular audience at the same time. It seems to me that you should be able to 'lose yourself' in a project and still produce something other people might want to read (and buy).

 

I have been experiencing the same phenomena, and my solution was to write a practice novel for no one but myself. (I'm not saying any one else should do this. I feel like I need to explain that this isn't really advice. It's just what is currently working for me.)

I have no intentions of showing it to anyone or publishing it. Doing that took away a lot of worry. I don't worry about whether it's written badly. I don't worry about all the writing techniques. I don't worry that my characters are likeable or even that the story is likeable. Because it probably isn't. Not to anyone but me.

I was way too caught up with writing techniques in my last attempted novel, and it killed it. It sucked all the joy out, and I went long periods of time without working on it which also killed it.

It's not that I don't have my own personal writing standards. I do. Sometimes while writing my WIP I'll see right away that I haven't expressed something well (Ex: Yikes, I just started that sentence with "suddenly"), but I keep going because I'm so emerged in my story that I don't always want to slow down and find the best way to say something.

To stop my inner critic from yelling at me, I tell myself I'll fix it in the edits. I do plan to edit, even though no one will see it. I plan to bring this novel to completion. I'll think more about writing techniques at that time. Right now, it's more important to get the story out of me.

And I'm learning a lot of new things about novel writing that I wouldn't have been able to if I was still so hung up on individual sentences and words. I'm learning to work through bigger story problems, how to get from point A to B, pace, etc. So ditching the "rules" has helped me to move forward and learn about other things, and most importantly, enjoy myself. My characters make me happy. They're so nuts. The poor things. I feel that happy, excited, creative energy running through me whenever I'm writing them.

I haven't ditched good writing techniques forever. I plan to go back and take out a lot of my adverbs and so forth and find better ways of saying things after the story itself has finally been torn out of me.

And I do enjoy editing and re-working sentences, but it's a separate sort of enjoyment for me. It's like how playing someone's song on the piano is all about reading the music, getting the keys right, but composing your own piano song is all about sound. I'll compose the song first, and then I'll go back and try to get every key right because I can't seem to daydream up an interesting story and edit it at the same time. It kills my music.

Maybe with more practice. One day.

 

Wow. You hit several nails on the head here, at least as far as I'm concerned.

I wrote nearly half of my first novel before I admitted to anybody that I was writing at all. Like you, I told myself that nobody else would see it, if it didn't turn out to my satisfaction. It not only made me write the way I wanted to, but it made me totally honest. I made up my mind that I would approach things like sexual scenes in a frank manner, befitting the characters and their situations, and to hell with what people thought. I think that approach worked for me, and made me explore depths I might not have done if I'd had people figuratively peering over my shoulder as I wrote.

I think the key might be to not let people know I'm writing again, when I do start back working on Opus 2. I'll give that a try. Thanks for the idea.

I don't think I'm getting hung up on individual sentences and words. It's more that I'm now aware of the things I needed to edit out of my first draft of my first novel, and I'm trying not to make the same mistakes again. But maybe it was the mistakes that gave my first novel some life? Dunno. But I'll try to make myself less conscious of that sort of thing. I think it's doing me more harm than good. So what if I put in too many adjectives and have people face-palming and wringing their hands? If it moves my story along, why not? I can always edit this back down later on. Right?

I have never understood the impulse to show half-finished work to people. Getting feedback at an unfinished stage would kill writing stone-dead for me. I know some people like doing that and are able to write through it, but I just can't.

 

Again, we're exactly in the same situation. Those words seems so familiar.

I think we accidentally merged our writer brain and editor brain together.

I feel that the need to correct yourself while writing came from somewhere. Teachers and Professors (at least in my experience) did not make the distinction between writing to get it all out (saying what you want/need to say) and REVISING. The distinction of the two is very important imo.

For those who are struggling with this, you may not consciously be thinking of satisfying others while critically correcting yourself. But I believe that feeling is there deep down somewhere. People don't want to make themselves look cliche or melodramatic (even though it's the first draft), so they get into this habbit of trying to make everything they write perfect and concise even if it's the first thing that comes down on the page. (which is why I hated the essay part of the SAT. I need to do at least two drafts before I feel comfortable submitting an essay.) Instead you need to let go. Think about the feelings, the atmosphere of the story. Here isn't the time to think about sentence variety and grammar.

Don't doubt yourself if you like the way something sounds. Keep it. There may be a whisper in the back of your head saying "This sounds corny." Don't listen to it until later, until the editing process. Often I'll try to get the first sentence of a chapter or book perfect before continuing to the next. I become indecisive and immediately an uncertain mood is established throughout the rest of my writing. I'll have a fight with myself.

"Why can't I keep this?"
"Because it sounds melodramatic."
"Well, it didn't sound melodramatic a second ago...."
"C'mon, look at all those adjectives and modifiers. And it doesn't sound interesting, it's not enough to pull people in."
"Well...now that you mention it." DELETE

Over and over again. So you have to have confidence in the writing side of your brain. Make it pretty and neat in the revision.

I think a lot of us learn from "How to" books, Guides, and articles online -- they all push you to write how society wants you to write. They focus too much on what will make your writing conventional, or what will put it on the shelf, instead of what will put it in your heart.

Hopefully I'm at least steering in the right direction with this haha

 

BEAUTIFUL idea. I will certainly do this. Seems like something that will definitely help me with this problem. I just have to make sure that if I end up really liking it half way through, I won't cop out and start writing for publication (thus failing the exercise).

 

I still go through this a bit in an opposite way. My stuff is kinda offbeat; I don't often conform. I like to play with wording and language, and plot is not my strong suit. I worry at times is it too much? I back away from projects arguing who is going to seriously read about cockroaches? and I sometimes throw in the towel and choke off my style. When these anxious attacks come I don't feel free. I feel self conscious and not very productive. It's very self defeating.

Eventually I say screw it, I like my story. I like the way I write. And it took too long to get to this point to back off now. That's when I can get immersed in the scene. When I can put all the stuff like readers, publishers, salability behind me and just stay in the story moment.
To me it's writing thinking - first draft - RELAX!

 

I follow King. He said keep your book in closed door mode until it's ready and that's exactly what I do. That means don't even tell anyone the title. Sharing your novel is the ultimate reward, the carrot that keeps you going.


Wringing your hands and face palming is just bad writing. We both know that, but it's not somehing you need to be concerned with in draft 1. That's the beauty of the draft system. First you get the crap out, then you make a scaffold, then you strengthen it, and then you let things grow . Then you prune one last time. It's both "planning" and "Pantsing," and every draft is fun because you know what you're supposed to be doing for it.

 

Right. I know that there are people who can try to write near-finished-quality work at the beginning, and are still able to write, and that's dandy for them. But the idea that you 'waste time' if you have to do a ton of editing after the first draft makes no sense to me. If you're not a start-at-finished-quality writer, you're not. You're just not. Also, you're not. And it doesn't matter the least little bit that it would be more efficient to become one--you're NOT. I'm not, and it's highly unlikely that I ever will be. And trying to be that writer will ease far more time than accepting the kind of writer that I am.

I do do a fair bit of editing as I go along, but I've realized that that editing is usually when I need to to get something FOR the writing, FROM the writing.

Like I may not know how I want a scene to go, and I may decide that it's too melodramatic and dreary FOR ME. In that case, I may go through and tweak it and and add some humor and make it more stylized, because that's what I need to get myself into the right mood. The characters do and say things, and I stylize what they do and say, and that tells me what I really want them to do and say. Later, I may go back and make the scene a little more melodramatic and dreary again, because the way that scene "tastes" in the whole work may be different from the way that I needed it to taste while I was figuring it out.

 

I think the question to ask yourself is: what do you want to write about? Not what you think you should write about, or what society wants you to write about. What story do you want want to write? Or better yet, what's the story you want to read? The kind of story that you'd jump up and down with joy at its existence in your local bookstore before taking it off the shelf to run home and read with a cup of tea/coffee? The kind of story you'd stay up late reading because you can't put it down? Write the story you'd want to read.

I've got news for ya: There are 7,000,000,000 people on the Earth. All with different tastes in literature (if they even like literature at all!) There are people who want serious, gritty stories that explore the philosophical nature of the human condition and there are people who just want a light-hearted campy novel filled with pure escapism. There are those who want a story that redefines its literary genre and there are those who just want to read a story about a by-the-book cop/YA detective, or a gang of magical underdogs saving the world, or an adventurous starship captain fighting epic space battles, or survivors of an apocalyptic or dystopian future. Or even a romance between a human girl and a fantasy creature.

If it exists, period, someone's gonna want to read it.

I've other news for ya: Regardless of whether or not a story is bad, I still have respect for the author who at least looked like he/she was enjoying the hell out of it. I read Eragon once and by God, I could almost feel the passion he poured into it. Every word on the pages felt like they were written with love and excitement. I could almost imagine him thinking, "I love my characters, I love my setting, I love everything about it!!' If the book felt like its author hated every last minute of it, I'm left wondering why the author even wasted his/her time with it. This was what I got with the later books of Paolini's The Inheritance Cycle. It felt like he was forcing himself to write the three books that followed Eragon.

If you like it, if you feel passionate about it, then write it. If you're the only person in the world that the story managed to satisfy, then, well, I think the story did its job. A story that satisfied no one, not even its own author, is a failed story.

 

I know you're both absolutely right. But what is weird for me, as a born over-writer and pantser, is having to go back and put face-palming and hand-wringing back IN! It's the exact opposite of what happened to me first time. I'm not consciously striving for perfection with each sentence, believe me, but I'm finding now that my tendency is to write minimalist rather than melodrama ...and that's somehow sucked life out of the creation process. It's very weird.

I may have figured out my problem. My first novel was definitely pantsed. I had a vision of characters, some of their interaction, a fair conception of the setting, etc, but exactly how the story was going to go or the characters were going to develop was not clear. So I plunged into the middle, wallowed, wrote towards both ends of the story, then cleaned up the mess later.

My second novel is a direct sequel, and I am very much in love with the concept. I already know my two main characters very well. I'm changing the setting and leaving quite a few of the characters from my first novel behind and introducing new ones, but the framework for the story is set. This story also has a strong purpose, which is also 'set.' I know exactly what the ending to this one will be. This story also has an unbreakable time frame, because it's a historical novel, set in the 'real' past, and the start and end dates are fixed. So what happens in the story, has to happen within a close timeframe I must stick to. I haven't written a formal outline, but my notes for this one come damn close to being one.

In the first novel, I had to stick within the boundaries of changing seasons. In this novel I have to stick within the boundaries of changing seasons, specific train schedules, routes, timetables —ditto for a steamship. And the concert schedules in Boston—and the start of a major blizzard season that decimated the Montana cattle industry at the end of 1886. Oh, and the duration of a pregnancy! So I'm not quite as free to invent this story's pace as I was the last one.

All of these factors are probably contributing to my feeling that I don't have much freedom with this novel, which is probably contributing to my need to get from A to B in a tidy fashion. I think I just need to be prepared to over-write character and emotion without going off-track in terms of time and place. In this sense, this is a new challenge. Historical sequel-writing is definitely not 'churning out story after story,' it turns out. This is a totally different experience this time.

Anyway, thanks for the understanding and the great feedback. Much appreciated. I feel calmer already.

 

Do not EVER question your offbeat style or choice of tale! You stand out. You have an incredibly inventive and playful soul—which isn't afraid of tackling dark subjects and getting quite emotional in the process—and it is what makes your writing special. You can work on your presentation AFTER you've written, but you are one of those people whose stories will last, once you hit your stride. Who can ever forget wee Hetty, and her creative worms? Incidentally, I first read that book in Kindle format, but have since also bought the paperback. I (still) intend to re-read, once I get out from under other committments, and then I'll write a review for Amazon. I prefer to use a paper book for that, because I want to be able to page back and forth when I'm writing the review. (Well, okay, I also bought the paperback because I LOVE that cover!)

 

I would say historical fiction is one of the harder genres.

And yes....guys, fantasy is the easiest. Na na na.

 

Her name is Tetty *cough*

 

@peachalulu - Well, that answers the question : who could forget wee Hetty?

 

And more fun. No worries about real-world constraints at all.

*pales* I kind of....don't... *swims away dramatically*

 

Thanks everyone!
I've come to believe doubting is just something artists do. And I think doubt can be good as long you don't wallow or indulge in it. Helps keep you on your toes to always do better and strive for coherency.
Better than being too sure with nothing to back up that assurance.