the blanket problem

[jazzfish]

tl;dr: I hate revising because my brain is terrified I'll screw up something that's currently not-terrible.

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So I have this story. It's okay, people seem to like it, but it needs more. So I'm adding in a scene or two and filling in some backstory.

I can't shake the sense that every change I make is, instead of improving things, ruining whatever it was that made the story good to start with.

I complained about it on twitter, and talked it over with a couple of people, and suddenly that looked really familiar.

Imagine it's the dead of winter, and you've woken up in the middle of the night. You're buried under blankets and you're mostly warm enough. Only mostly, though. You've started to get a little chilly.

There's a thermostat on the wall. You can get up and turn the heat up a couple of degrees, and then you'll be fine.

Trouble is, you have to get up. Get out from under the blankets, into the cold air, where you'll be genuinely cold instead of just a bit chilly.

Instead I have a bad habit of staying buried under the blankets and convincing myself that I'm not really that cold. And compared to how I'd be while I'm out, it's true! It just misses the point that I'd be completely comfortable pretty soon after, for some small effort and discomfort now.

Same thing. The story as it is works, sort of. Why mess with it? Why risk making it worse?

Answer: Because it doesn't work, because there is no 'sort of works' any more than 'sort of comfortable.' Because it's worth making the story better, and if that makes it worse to start with then I can correct that when I hear about it.

Comments

[northboundtrain]

I started out writing about five years ago (I wish I had started 25 years ago!). For me, writing is a slow, painful process. I like to be very precise about the words I put down, and I think way, way faster than I can type, and in ways that don't convey well into the imprecision of these things called words. But I push through it because I get so much enjoyment out of it, and such a sense of accomplishment.

After about six chapters into the first story I started on another one (and basically haven't touched the first one since). This second one was unexpected and has turned into a labor of love that will, undoubtedly, never be published. At 146k words and 32 chapters, I figure I'm about 55-60% done (just one of the many reasons it will never be published). I let a friend read it and he encouraged me to write more and has encouraged me that it needs to be read by others some day, so I harbored secret hopes that maybe one day it could possibly be published at some point.

I hooked up with a writing group last January and let more people read it, which was terrifying and awesome all at once. I got such incredible feedback from two or three people, and my writing abilities evolved tremendously, which made me, quite literally, pause to re-write 30 chapters of work (I've only done about 12 chapters, with maybe another six partially re-written and two written "correctly" the first time). Thank god for Scrivener, that's all I can say.

During the course of that month-long writing workshop I found a publisher that I would like to work with one day. Problem is, they're an invite-only publisher, but they do open calls, on occasion (and once you've published a story with them, you're invited). So, at the beginning of February I decided to answer one of their open calls, due at the end of June, I believe. Given that I've never finished anything yet and that my progress is glacially slow, this was a stretch from the get-go. I also decided to change POV (from first to third) and styles (I don't even know if the style has a name -- have you ever seen the movie or play Same Time, Next Year?) and went from strictly a pantser to laying out the plot up-front with an outline and everything -- I was playing with fire. And then I decided to let another dear friend (Kevin) read it, which was terrifying. Needless to say, I got burned.

About 20-25% of the way through I stopped and wanted to get a sanity check to see if it was even worth continuing. Of the three people who were my beta readers, not one liked the story, the style or even the characters. So I re-worked the story from their input, doubling it and adding more details and softening some characters and such and they still didn't like it, one of them so much that he couldn't get through even a single chapter. I eventually realized that my third-person POV just sucked. I didn't have enough experience with it (i.e. any) to write a whole, 100k word story in a coherent manner. So I re-wrote it again, turning it inside out, almost, and wow, did I ever love the thing after that! Sadly, no one else did, still, and my deadline was fast approaching with 75% still to be written, so I put it aside.

I had learned so much, though. And about a month later that same invite-only publisher posted another open call, this one for October 1. I started yet another story, this time with the intention that it be a short-story (10k words), and my goal was simply to finish it, which I did. Two of the three people reading it liked it, the other (Kevin) hated it. Like, hated-it-with-a-passion kind of hated it. And he was friend enough (and courageous enough) to tell me. It took me almost a week to bring myself to read his critique, which was not nearly as bad as I thought it would be. And he had some valid points, too, which I incorporated back into the story. All-in-all I was happy enough with it that I submitted it for publication. I should hear in another couple of months whether or not they will take it.

In the end, that experience right there, with a very close friend handing me some harsh feedback, was the best, most liberating thing to have hit me. If someone I cared for deeply, whose opinions I valued greatly, could rip apart my work, my baby, and I could not only survive it but learn from it, then I could submit this story to a bunch of nameless, faceless strangers and survive their possible rejection.

All of which is to say...look at this amazing journey I went on.