process and words
Jun. 22nd, 2009 01:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfish"To be a writer, you must write. And no amount of prep-work is writing. Research is not writing. Taking notes about the world is not writing. Thinking about writing is not writing. Only writing is writing."
--Gene Wolfe, May 2006
I've not really written much of anything in the last four years. Stuff from before that was all for class. So, I feel like I'm still discovering my process here. It's. . . very strange, and not terribly comfortable.
Cory Doctorow once mentioned that he writes the way people drive by their headlights: you can only see about fifteen feet in front of you, but you can make the whole trip that way. That sounds about right. I don't know what the next scene is going to be until I'm nearly done with this one. When I'm starting a scene I don't necessarily know where it's going. Occasionally I don't even know what the next sentence will bring.
What I'm finding about this thing I'm working on now (working title: "Junkyard Dog") is that I'm only writing maybe half to two-thirds of each scene, just sketching in the work it needs to do. It's littered with notes like DOG SCARES THEM OFF and SHE FIXES IT. This feels like cheating. More, it feels like I'm going to get to the end and have an entire manuscript full of half-written scenes that I need to complete and fix.
Of course, there's the fact that if I sit down and can't figure out what to do with the next scene I can go back and flesh out one of the previous ones, and maybe that'll get me unstuck. Still. It seems I don't so much need permission to write badly, as permission to write halfway.
I'm also working my way through Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft, as a way to get myself used to writing again. Some are fun, some are headache-inducing, all are useful. (She's sadly enamored with Strunk and White. Ah well.)
The first one, "write a piece meant to be read aloud," was a lot more fun than I'd thought it would be. It not only made me think hard about the sounds of words and phrases, it got me rolling them around in my mouth as I typed, just for the sheer enjoyment of the language.
This feels overly self-indulgent, like who would want to wade through an entire several thousand words of that? For me I'd think it would be exhausting pretty quickly, I'd get fed up. But. . . it does flow pretty well, and it's fun (though tiring) write. Leave it in the 'someday' file, I think.
--Gene Wolfe, May 2006
I've not really written much of anything in the last four years. Stuff from before that was all for class. So, I feel like I'm still discovering my process here. It's. . . very strange, and not terribly comfortable.
Cory Doctorow once mentioned that he writes the way people drive by their headlights: you can only see about fifteen feet in front of you, but you can make the whole trip that way. That sounds about right. I don't know what the next scene is going to be until I'm nearly done with this one. When I'm starting a scene I don't necessarily know where it's going. Occasionally I don't even know what the next sentence will bring.
What I'm finding about this thing I'm working on now (working title: "Junkyard Dog") is that I'm only writing maybe half to two-thirds of each scene, just sketching in the work it needs to do. It's littered with notes like DOG SCARES THEM OFF and SHE FIXES IT. This feels like cheating. More, it feels like I'm going to get to the end and have an entire manuscript full of half-written scenes that I need to complete and fix.
Of course, there's the fact that if I sit down and can't figure out what to do with the next scene I can go back and flesh out one of the previous ones, and maybe that'll get me unstuck. Still. It seems I don't so much need permission to write badly, as permission to write halfway.
I'm also working my way through Ursula Le Guin's Steering the Craft, as a way to get myself used to writing again. Some are fun, some are headache-inducing, all are useful. (She's sadly enamored with Strunk and White. Ah well.)
The first one, "write a piece meant to be read aloud," was a lot more fun than I'd thought it would be. It not only made me think hard about the sounds of words and phrases, it got me rolling them around in my mouth as I typed, just for the sheer enjoyment of the language.
This feels overly self-indulgent, like who would want to wade through an entire several thousand words of that? For me I'd think it would be exhausting pretty quickly, I'd get fed up. But. . . it does flow pretty well, and it's fun (though tiring) write. Leave it in the 'someday' file, I think.