You think Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliette when he was 12 and writing his first play? Or maybe Metamorphsis was Kafka's first ever piece of writing? Lolita? How many pieces of work do you think each of these masters wrote, and scrapped, before writing the thing we know today? If you "cannot write shit" and you'd rather "not write at all", then you're saying you don't wanna learn at all. You wanna wake up tomorrow and write like Nabokov without ever having tried and failed, without ever having written anything before that point, without ever having to learn. I'm similar in this regard when it comes to music - I love the idea of being able to play the piano, or any instrument really. And I've picked up piano and keyboard lessons, thought about picking up guitar and violin and flute lessons, and took singing lessons for a spell. I don't know how to play even a single instrument, and my singing is all right simply because I can keep a tune and I have a good voice, but that has nothing to do with singing techniques, breathing techniques, keeping in time, and all the skills that actually are needed for me to be able to say, "I can sing." I have some raw talent in there that I have not trained up, and that's about it. But I do not want to practice the piano. I do not want to sing songs I do not enjoy the melody of. I do not want to play songs that sound like crap because it takes me about 5min just to figure out which note on the piano I need to press. I do not want the hard work. I just want the results. I want to be able to simply play beautiful music without ever having to learn. Guess what? Not gonna happen. You're not gonna wake up tomorrow and suddenly write beautiful, amazing prose, put together into a brilliant story with perfect pacing and structure without ever having to learn. And what happens when you learn? You make mistakes. Yes, you write crap. And then you scrap the crap and you go at it again. You write shit and then you edit it, you rewrite it, you polish it. So I've got a question: do you enjoy the process of writing? If you simply like to imagine stories in your head and never actually write it, that's absolutely fine. Maybe you prefer to simply tell stories verbally to friends, to your future kids, whoever. Maybe you like to tell stories on stage. There're many ways to tell stories without ever actually writing. So, do you actually enjoy writing itself? And if you do, if you say you really do wanna write these stories down - is a novel the best way to tell these stories? What about a graphic novel? What about a script? There're ways. Maybe a different kind of writing would suit you more. What about flash fiction, stories of like, 100 words long? It's pretty darn hard, but won't take half as long as an 80k word novel. If that's too short, how about short stories - 3000 words, 5000 words? What about poems? I remember watching a video by a polyglot and he made this spoof video of a "the first silent language camp" where speaking is forbidden, and it's a "You'll make NO MISTAKES in your target language at all, guaranteed or your money back!" See the irony? Yes, you'll make no mistakes, but you'll also never speak. So, if your attitude is, "I don't wanna write shit," then I'm afraid all you'll end up with is, you won't write shit. Would you be happy with that? What is it you want? Do you wanna write a book because you love the idea of it, as opposed to actually loving writing? Lastly, the perfect story won't come if you never write it. You can't polish something and make it perfect if you got nothing to edit. There's nothing to sculpt if there isn't even a lump of clay to begin with. Your first rough draft is just the raw material and currently you got none. You have ideas and nothing to actually work with. Stop wasting time in the planning stages - if you've got 152 pages of ideas, then you have enough to get started. Write, woman! If writing is what you wanna do. And that's the only real question: do you want to write at all?
I think that you underestimate the importance of writing "Shit." Writing is like anything else, you have to do it badly until you do it well. There is no way around that. Even when you become comfortable with your style, you are still going to write the occasional piece of "shit." I just did. The last three stories I posted here were "shit," but they were also way outside my comfort zone. I think that I learned more from them (or it, three pieces telling that same story) than I have from anything in a long time. That's what I think anyway....
@Leanne, @jannert is right on, and I will be enjoying some Scotch with her and Jack in Glasgow in a few weeks. The Eagle and the Dragon started out as a concept in commute to Washington while stuck in traffic in 1995. I had just read about a Roman mission to China in 166AD, in which the two emperors knew each other by name, so it was not the first. We talked about how that first mission might have gone down, what problems they might run into, how the language barrier would be surmounted. I went back and wrote the first chapter, which got my head into the story. The outline was that Romans go to China by ship, pirates try to take the ship away. Get to the court, shit happens, something about a woman and the centurion, have to make a choice between Roman honor and something, and get out of town overland with lots of people trying to kill them. Twenty years later, I finished the first draft. It was pretty ugly, but the story was in place, the polishing could begin. I went through seven major revisions, one professional edit, and a whole lot of minor revisions, before I published. The first draft is going to be ugly. Just to remind myself how ugly, I have an archive folder with all the original chapters (did not write one manuscript until first revision - 80 chapters had to be merged into one) so I can see where I started. Some where dated 1995-1998. So just write. The soaring prose and imagery can come after you have finished that first ugly draft.
Well, Well, that sounds like what an intuitive author does - he/she just sits and writes, and I am not that, I can assure you. Still, thank you for your response.
I meant to add: if I pause in adding new material to my WIP for longer than about two days, it loses a huge amount of the appeal. I certainly can’t say this is universal, but I saw it expressed by a Proper Published Author in a book of essays about writing. So I’ve formed my rule of completing a polished new scene every 2 days. It tends to really be every 3, but the goal is to keep new material coming. If I then never use the new scene, that’s fine.
If you were totally happy with your current process, I’d just nod. But it sounds like you’re not. Why not think about the intuitive writer thing, or about trying elements of it? (For example, if you can’t imagine writing an unplanned book, what about an unplanned scene or an unplanned secondary character?) What’s the worst that could happen?
I often do, especially because I have found that my taste differs significantly from that of the broad masses. I console myself with the thought that it gives me an opportunity to stick out from the crowd and attract the readers who are original thinkers.
What makes you think that your tastes are that different? I’m asking because there’s a fine line between, “I’ll choose this niche and cherish my subset of readers,” and “Anyone who fails to recognize my genius isn’t worth my time.” The first can guide you nicely; the second, IMO, can be a roadblock to improvement.
Without wanting to sound harsh, as Kurt Vonnegut says, writers write. If you've got 152 pages of notes but only one page of writing you are focussing your time on the wrong thing. There is no short cut to writing a book its butt in the chair words on the page, so stop planning and start writing what you've planned This isn't about intuitive vs planning, you've already done the planning, now is the time to write something
I understand the way you are feeling. Although I don't view creative writing as "useless" at all (it is one of my hobbies that can help keep me sane, since I really only have an 8-5 job and just need to worry about bills/rent/groceries), I get the frustration of feeling like the process drags on longer than you might wish. I have no plans on ever being published (I write for my own enjoyment), but I do want to finish an original story at least once in my life (I have only finished fan fiction, but those stories did help me flex my writing muscles, so they weren't pointless in hindsight). I've given up on my original goal of trying to finish a story (novel-length) by x years old, as well as my hopes that I'd get specific stories finished. I'm now just going with the flow, trying to accept the fact that not all of my "children" will "grow up" and be completed. I am, however, really trying to focus on my newest story, since it is quite different from other stories I've attempted to write, so it's worth a shot. I don't exactly have any advice for your current predicament, since I am struggling a bit as well, but I hope that me telling you about my own circumstances and viewpoints can be at least somewhat helpful.
Just cannot seem to get down anything half decent. I get these days sometimes, not too often, and i know tomorrow I will re-read what i have done and laugh at my inability to write . . . Rgds
It's okay to have those days. Just don't dwell on it too much. Do something else and go back to writing later.
First try doing an one page poem or free write to get your mind going. Don’t censor your self, just write as much as you can. I never use spell check or auto correct. It’s okay to just get the ideas down on paper. They don’t have to be perfect, you can revise them later. Failing the above, take a break of some kind or do brainstorming so you have a more focused plan of attack. I remember my first attempt at a novel falling apart because of numerous plot holes and logistic problems. Improving takes time and lots of practise so you won’t get better if you don’t write consistently.
I poo the feeling. Somepoos, everypoo I poo is poo But poo just have to poo your best to poo through it, and poo that poomorrow will be a better poo!
As an “Armchair” physicist, I am aware that whatever I come up with is going to be is going to be absolute crap from a scientific standpoint. But, it does inspire some (I hope) some interesting fiction. Case in point, three short stories that I posted on this board. All three of them with the same basis. Two of them were abject failures “The Accidental Alchemist,” “All that glitters is not Lead,” and the third, “Rumpelstiltskin's Smile.” The third one, Judging by the comments, worked pretty well. While the first two stunk on ice. I thought it might be helpful to share what I learned from these stories. In, “The Accidental Alchemist,” I took an idea I had about the nature of matter and built a story around it pretty much using my thought process as a pattern. No one understood it. I'm guessing that other folks don't have a constant debate and diatribe going on in their head, so the reader could not relate, Scrapped it. Tried the story again. “All that glitters is not lead,” Since the MC was an old man in the story, I thought it would be necessary to understand perspective of old age to grasp the story. BUZZZ! Wrong, thank-you for playing. Folks said it sounded “Preachy.” Scrapped again. “Rumpelstiltskin's smile,” The old man is no longer the focus (MC.) Nothing changed except the story is told from the perspective of a police person. Lesson taken from the second story about describing age, “The only way you can understand aging is to experience it, and then it's too late.” So I took that concept out. In the first story I explained the “Scientific” principal by which the alchemy occurred. Big mistake! The reader doesn't care, and is not likely to. If you have to put the story down to consider it, the reader is going to leave it down and go on to the next story. Being honest, I thought at the time that the first story was flipping' great. I still like it, but it appeals only to me. Second story was “Preachy.” let me apologize if you read that one. The third, while a more successful tale, did not fulfill the goals that I had for the story. It was too long and well within my comfort zone and I was trying to do something a little daring, at least for me. If you have a learning experience like this, please share. There is no point in you making the same mistakes I did or the other way around.
Save it for later. Sometimes you find interesting things growing out of poo. Seriously, this works. When you wrote it in the first place, you obviously had something that you thought was a good premise. The fact that it didn't work the first time shouldn't discourage you from revisiting it later. You might find out where the execution of the premise was flawed, and fix it. This sort of thing only comes to the surface after you've had some distance from it. Right now, you're too close to see it.
You've got to write a lot of bad stuff to be able to write any of the good stuff. That's what I've found to be the case at least.
