The drafting process

[breakinglight11]

The drafting process doesn’t come naturally to me, and as such, at times I find it frustrating. During my early development as a writer, I was extremely compelled to edit as I wrote, and if I couldn’t figure out just how I wanted to phrase something, I wouldn’t write it. That lead to nothing ever getting written, as that level of perfectionism is

Comments

[lisefrac]

It wasn’t until I started telling myself to just write SOMETHING, no matter how bad it was, no matter how far away from what I was envisioning, that I started actually making progress. Amen to that. There was a saying we threw around at VP: you can't edit the blank page

[elenuial]

I think this is a problem a lot of beginning writers have--actually getting stuff down, and finishing their work. This is why I think NaNoWriMo is so important at a certain point in the learning process, as it teaches you to write (almost) every day, and to just put words down, even if they're the wrong ones. Other challenges (like your 31 plays) or writing prompts are valuable for similar reasons.

I actually didn't have this problem until after I went the Writer Camp. I think it made my internal editor too strong. I can moderate it with booze, but history shows how that usually ends up being a terrible idea.

Usually, though, when I've talked to people who are revise-as-you-go, the switch wasn't changing their style (like P. here) so much as doing things like having better planning or having a limit on in-process revisions. It's interesting to me to see you guys talk about doing the traditional "fuck it for the first draft" process instead. It's a trick I've never been able to get the hang of.

[lisefrac]

I definitely struggled a little bit more with my internal editor after writing camp. It was especially hard to go from these critiques by authors I admire to having to write a piece of short fiction to a prompt. Somehow, I was able to do it. It kind of felt like my mind just shifted into the right gear.

I dunno, I have no good advice, I guess. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

[witticaster]

I...yeah. Thank you. I should learn these things. I still almost always write for perceived perfection, and thus never get past the first area that stumps me. And when I look at old, flawed writing, I'm too discouraged by it to continue. Which means that the only things I've ever finished are quick and tiny. I enjoy them, but they're flashes, not anything of substance.

[jducoeur]

Interesting. The same is mostly true of programming -- indeed, I've gradually learned that the most common and worst mistake you can make in programming is over-thinking things. The best code usually arises from getting a rough idea of what you're doing, slamming out the code, and then "refactoring" (revising) it afterwards.

In programming, we've gradually developed something of a discipline around refactoring: an ever-growing list of specific problems to look out for (usually called "bad smells"), and common options for how to improve them. Does anything of the sort exist in writing, or does everyone just wing it?

There may be no cognate discipline -- it may not even be a sensible question in writing -- but I'm struck by how your writing process resembles my programming one...