the writing bit

[jazzfish]

Bleh, insomnia during a head cold. I'm just barely too muzzy-headed to do anything useful, and it's not like I'm getting any sleep. May as well finish and post this.

So, in addition to an awful lot of fine writing advice, some excellent company, and insightful if sometimes contradictory critiques of my submission story, I got one more thing out of Viable Paradise: I wrote a story under a strict deadline.

The story I wrote was, word for word, the hardest thing I've ever written. "Catastrophic global warming," they say, "rigorous extrapolation of hard science," they say, "hopeful and non-post-apocalyptic," they say; "bah," sez I. Thankfully I had a bunch of other people around who were in similar boats, and we could all sit around and type madly and grumble at each other.

(It turns out writing's easier in good company. I don't know if it's the shared task, or just the sense that other people are writing and therefore my brain says it's Okay for me to be writing, and in fact I'd better be writing so I can Fit In. O, brain.)

Most of what I learned from the experience can be summed up in a conversation I had around lunchtime on Thursday:

aamcnamara: How's your story coming?
Me: ... do me a favor? Tell me it doesn't suck?
aamcnamara (who has read none of this story): It doesn't suck.

And, you know, that helped, more than I'd expected it to. I knew it had problems. The plot wasn't a plot so much as "some stuff happens to the characters in the middle of a conversation," the theme was thin, etc etc. But it also had things I do well. Dialogue. The rhythm and flow of the prose. Bits of characterization, hints of worldbuilding. It doesn't suck, not entirely, not even when I'm struggling and flailing. I can do this.

That, I'm pretty sure, is the most important thing I brought out of that week.

Comments

[thanate]

That doesn't suck, either.

I associate communal writing with the quilting bee kind of thing: you're all doing something that on its own might be semi-boring (or difficult, or whatever it is that makes your brain shy away a bit from concentrating on it) and because there are lots of you, punctuating by gossip, or even just all doing the same thing together, it's more fun b/c you've got the company.

That was too many clauses, wasn't it? Sorry!

[jazzfish]

That makes a lot of sense. (Scary, in some sense I've not quite pinned down.)

No worries; I grant exemptions for casual conversation!

[aamcnamara]

And lo, it did not suck!

[jazzfish]

:) Why thank you.

[queenoftheskies.livejournal.com]

I think that's a great lesson to have taken home.

Are you still having "ah-ha" moments now that we've been out of VP almost a month?

Hope your cold is better soon.

[jazzfish]

Not so many, really... other than the obvious one that the aha moments will come more often if I just Sit Down To Write Already. Which is always a struggle for me, even when my head's not packed tight with stupid germs. (I think they're more or less done now at least.)

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

It does not suck!

And you know that crits are not objective, though we all try to make them that way. We're too finite, and finally a crit comes down to "what I'd like to read, given this beginning." So . . . do you trust that person's reading chops?

[jazzfish]

On the whole, it doesn't. There's a lot of space between "doesn't do exactly what i want it to do" and "suck." Acknowledging that space is a new and different thing for me, and I'm still sort of trying it on to see how it fits.

I'm a little afraid of internalizing that too deeply. The failure mode of that is brushing off all criticism with "well they just didn't get it," and I'm pretty invested in not being That Writer. Which mostly means I need to start trusting my judgement as to whose critiques to trust.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yeah--and that is going to be an ongoing work, and not always the same peeps for the same project.

The one best thing (and the hardest to find) in my experience is getting fresh eyes.