writing about writing blah blah

[queenlua]

lately, i've been trying to be a little more systematic with how i approach my writing.

not in terms of writing schedule, or wordcount goals (though there is a bit of that), more like—i'm keeping a little log of the problems/decisions/tradeoffs i encounter while i'm writing any particular piece, and i'm trying to figure out how i make those decisions, if i can make those decisions faster, etc.

because—look, i'm a slow writer in general, but if i'm in a groove, 1k/day isn't too hard to hit. if i could hit that groove consistently i'd be golden. the problem i often run into, though, is that i'll have a piece mostly done, but then i'll spend like, damn near a week rewriting the same transition over and over because nothing's quite working, and i'll try fiddling with every damn lever available to me (do i need to switch PoV here? does this one scene need to be three scenes instead, and if so, how does that change the overall flow of my narrative? can i word this in a way with the desired conciseness that's still clear? etc), and so on. and i usually find a solution eventually (or, give up, throw hands, and push out something suboptimal), but then two months later i've forgotten all the shit i tried to make that work, and how i decided on the thing i did, because my brain's a damn sieve. and i'm hoping if i record that process, i'll be able to internalize it better, and converge on a solution faster, when i run into similar problems in the future?

in a way this feels not-unlike when i was learning mathematical theory—i was playing catch-up in college on that front, trying to figure out how proofs even worked, and of course the kids who'd been doing this stuff for years couldn't really explain their process. "idk, i looked at it and it felt like an inductive approach would work, so i just did that" i managed to catch up to them only when i started thinking of math in terms of tools—you've got a bunch of math widgets and theorems and axioms lying around, can you use any of them in some fun way for this problem?—and i'd just grind through trying shit out until something stuck. and that works! eventually you internalize some things!

so, hopefully being explicit about my thought process will help me figure out why sometimes the words come fast and why sometimes it's a slog. we'll see!

* * *
at some point i got annoyed at Writing Advice Books, because so many of them focus on more basic elements of craft, or writing prompts for "inspiration", or religious adherence to some Fixed Way Stories Much Work—but maybe there's some book that addresses this sort of thing? stuff like "if you're having an issue introducing a character [x] given [y] complicated situation, here's some stuff to try that you may not have thought about?"

maybe what would be helpful is something like that "writing as a craft q&a" that Ursula Le Guin ran online for a while. (maybe i should pick y'all's brains more...!*)

* i've also toyed with the idea of posting some of the stuff from my "writing decisions" log, but i somewhat suspect that'd only be of academic interest and/or only of interest to me, so

or maybe i'll discover something entirely new about "when the words come easily" vs "when words are horrible"; i'm reminded of this old bit from Virginia Woolf:

"Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year."

anyway yeah that's what's up in writingtown lately, thoughts welcome

Comments

[lassarina]

did you happen to sign up for getyourwordsout this year? We do a lot of writing craft posts and while I can fish out and send you mine, I can't share the stuff other people write (but if you were to join us next year you can read all the archives). We have an interesting mix of fan and pro writers, so we get a fairly wide range of perspectives on craft.

[queenlua]

i did, out of curiosity, and... hm, it's not vibing with me very much?

i haven't been following it too closely or making that much of an effort, mind, but the posts i've seen are kinda more in the category of "how to find time to write," "how to manage writing vs other shit," etc, or seem to be craft discussions at such a high level of abstraction that they're hard to apply to my situation.

there's also the aspect of like, i don't know anyone and they don't know me :P historically, i'm able to vibe the best whenever there's like 3-20 people i recognize in a comm; that's small enough i vaguely know what everyone's about and am invested in their shit. really large online communities have just never worked for me. (see: i only live in small fandoms, etc)

[lassarina]

that's very fair, haha. I'm never sure how much detail to go into with craft stuff because we're working off a list of questions submitted which are not usually that detailed? So some of the things I've done have been really deep dives into my outlining process, but the one I did last night was necessarily kind of light because I was rushing, honestly. >.>;

[queenlua]

wait that gets into another question, like—how do the community discussion posts work? can anyone post anything or like, is there a set of mods who post things, etc etc?

(and to be clear, i didn't mean to bag on the comm or any one post in particular! "not my thing" is a far cry from bad/awful/useless, etc etc :P)

[lassarina]

So the community discussion posts are like - early on in the year the mods ask for people to submit things they're interested in having discussion posts on, and then people who volunteered as discussion leaders (like me!) choose topics we are interested in talking about. (I usually pick elements of craft I'm either rock solid on or ones I really want to learn about.) The mods assign some topics to particular months, or let us choose months we specifically want to post in for some things. We write our posts, submit them, and the mods approve or reject, and then the community can comment with their own thoughts on the craft posts.

Anyone can also post to the community at any time - so if you wanted to post something to solicit community feedback on how to X, go ahead!

or if you wanted to contact the mods to see about becoming a discussion leader or getting more topics that are more detailed, you definitely could! They're always looking for more help.

Volunteer posts are here to sign up and here for what things there are to do.

[queenlua]

gotcha, thanks! had no idea there was a submission box or anything of that sort, sounds lit

[lassarina]

I think a challenge of GYWO is that so much of this is kind of, launched at us at the start of the year when we're all recovering from the holidays (I only sort of gradually absorbed it over the *mumble* years I've been doing it.) Actually, now might be a good time for a revisit of this stuff for the community at large - I'm gonna go throw that suggestion to the mods.

[helicoprion]

I'd be interested in a peek at the writing decisions log, personally! Because I feel like my writing process is a lot of dumb floundering around and having to forcibly learn the same lessons over and over again. Maybe I'll learn better from someone else's mistakes, because my own are clearly not cutting it :P

Did recently read a book on revision that, aside from the obligatory Parts Where This Writing Book Gets Hella Dogmatic about Shit that Doesn't Matter, put forth one suggestion I like: if you know what happens next but just realized you haven't set up the proper preconditions, just fuckin' proceed with writing as if you already had done the work, and fix it in post. By the time you've gotten through the whole thing in some form you may have a better idea how to backfill or make any structural tweaks.

(The discussion of HOW to fix things in post - surprisingly given the book's ostensible topic, lol - was a little handwavey and shallow. Just suggests a couple of different levers you can pull and then "idk go do something else for a bit and come back, you'll figure it out.") (Dude also bought WAY harder into the "shitty first draft" ethos than I ever will, so YMMV.)

(and I also signed up for GYWO this year and am also not really feeling it, ahaha)

[queenlua]

hahaha. i'll let you know if i ever throw the thing online :P

i have no problem just skipping ahead to the good stuff! i tend to stumble the most in post, actually, like—okay i wrote scene 1 and scene 2 and figured i could figure out the inter-scene glue between them later... now it's later... i can't just fuckin publish a doc that has "And then he ____. ___. The next night," in the middle of it

[helicoprion]

ahhhh I misunderstood the problem, then. if it's like, "o fuck I know what happens next but I didn't do everything that needed to happen BEFORE, time to go throw out huge chunks of the earlier shit and redo it to fit" then that turns out surprisingly easy to fix in post. but if it's just, how get from one scene to next scene, then I have no idea and I have given up in favor of writing montages and pretending that's a fresh and cool and occasionally disorienting stylistic choice. :|; what IS a transition, honestly?