Torchwood story beta?
In about two or three hours, after I've eaten dinner and had a cuppa, I'm going to write the final scene of a Torchwood story. It'll need a beta or two. It's looking to come in at maybe 4,500 words, ish. It's timey-wimey, and I need a plot-hole checker, as well as the usual pace and horrible-prose checkers
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Wow, it's like you're inside my head. I do the exact same thing, pretty much word for evil sidetracking sabotaging word. At the same story stage, too - right before the climax of a scene or a chapter or a story, when the stakes are highest.
I sometimes feel like I managed to find a workaround in my development as a writer - a way to just hammer at a story until the climax works and the end can be written, so that it turns out a good story - but it's time-consuming and angrymaking and upsetting, and not at all efficient. And I've gone all my writing life doing this, instead of doing the ... I don't know, personality work? - that I need to put in, in order to get over myself and just write through it. Because it's not like I'm not a good writer - I am. It just takes too much effort and angst for me to get to the end of a story. Like every time I get to the big hurdle, I have to go cut down a tree and turn it into lumber and then get a hammer and nails and build a brand new ladder, instead of just having a solid ladder with me every time.
I don't know if you've ever read any Richard Bach, but he wrote a short novel called Illusions way back when. And part of this novel was an allegory about a tribe of creatures who lived along the bottom of a fast moving, rocky river. All their lives they clung to the bottom, because if they didn't, the river would take them and bash them against the rocks and they'd be lost. But one day, one of them had had enough of clinging, and though everyone tried to stop him, he let go of the river floor and the river took him, and it did dash him against the rocks, and he was hurt and bloodied and bruised, but eventually the river lifted him up, and he was able to look down as he flowed along safely in the current, and see all the beauty of the river below him.
It goes on into a bit about how some of the river people downstream saw him and called him Messiah because he was able to fly along in the current while they could only cling, and he tried to tell them that he was just like them, only he had let go, but they didn't believe him, and thought it was some special magic or power or blessing that made him different. Richard Bach is a bit odd.
But the images of that bit have always stayed with me, and I think that's what I need to do with my writing - let go of the rocks, you know? And just write, and let it suck for a while, because it will suck for a while, and people who read me might be all "wow, what happened to her, she used to be pretty decent." But if I keep at it, I think I'll learn the right way to get through the hard parts, and it'll be as easy for me as opening paragraphs always has been, instead of being incredibly scary.
Ah.... sorry to ramble endlessly. =D It's just something I think about a lot, and far easier typed than done. Plus, I'm avoiding writing the climax of this story...
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You've hit the nail on the head with the comment about the personality work. That's exactly what it is! One of the key tools for becoming better at something is reflection, and I've spent so many hours reflecting on the tools of writing and the stories I've written, and I can't believe it's taken so long to reflect on me as a writer. Duh. All that critical rubbish in my head -- it's the same script I used to have as a teenage girl, you know, about being fat (I wasn't) and unlovable (ditto) and all of that. We're programmed to do it, so that we toe the patriarchal line. And it's a bit galling to find it still there, at the heart of me, like a giant canker. How could I have been so unaware of it?
But that's where you're analogy is genius, because beating ourselves up for not being self-aware is not the answer. It's not crazy to be unaware of huge cultural pressures that are as transparent as fast-flowing water -- that's their very nature and what gives them power.
And I think you're right that the answer is in letting go: of expectations of our own talent/success, of fear of others' expectations about us, of our anger and fear of not being good enough, or being ignored. It really is the same stuff as feminism, right? In take one, it was letting go of the stupid ideals of beauty and femininity put forward in magazines. But this fear of not-being-good-enough at the thing we *do* is more insidious stuff, and it's so much harder to let go of.
You know, I'm rapidly becoming a fan of the idea of being kind to myself. I don't mean self-indulgent, and letting myself get away with crap. But acknowledging that I'm constantly negotiating a lot of those invisible cultural pressures, and that it's okay to try things and fail, and that my value comes from what I learn on the journey and what I share, in being a decent person, and not in being... whatever bizarre ideal I clearly think a writer needs to be.
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Do you think something like that would help?
I've often thought it would be useful to just have a group of people who could maybe give a reminder, like, "This is a first draft. It doesn't have to be perfect. Write a placeholder scene for now, and fix it later. Who cares about plot anyway! I'm here for the beverage drinking scenes. Do you have those? Yes? Then you're gold as far as I'm concerned. Want me to poke at the grammar in the first scene while you pick away at the ending?"
But I honestly have no idea to make a group like that, so that it doesn't fall into all the usual horrible pitfalls of writing groups. Any ideas?
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