A writing observation

[hmpf]

One thing that is extremely important to me in my writing is... I don't even know if there's an 'official' term for this... 'rhythm'? 'Sound'? 'Flow'? I spend a lot of time listening to what I write - rereading sentences and paragraphs and just listening to them, not for aspects of meaning but for things like... I dunno... sound, or sequencing,

Comments

Just one hour? ;-)

[hmpf]

I'm not kidding when I say that with some particularly problematic sentences, it takes me months before I settle on a final form. Which may just differ from the original form by the position of a comma, or the replacing of a comma with a semicolon. It drives me crazy, but I can't let it go before it 'feels right'.

Glad to know I'm not the only one who consciously works on this aspect! :-)

This is probably also why I've gravitated towards (prose-)poetry-like forms in recent years, either for whole fic(let)s or even just for parts of fics.

I find my writing process strikingly different for different types of fic, though - as a rule, the more plot there is, the less I seem to obsess about stylistic details and such (and the plainer my language gets, too). Fics that are built entirely on an idea, or on introspection, though - those I work over with a fine-toothed comb, sometimes for years.

I've also just realised something else: editing and rewriting is a bit like translating, isn't it? Well, at least it is for me. (It's also like weeding and pruning, of course, but those are the obvious analogies everyone think of when they think about editing.) I always start out with a lot of triteness and banality, and then, in successive revisions, 'translate' the trite, banal placeholder sentences into something else. Sometimes I don't manage that with every sentence, of course. There are a few sentences in the bit I posted above, for example, that have resisted translation so far.

I really wish the more 'striking' ways of phrasing things would come to me in a less laborious process, though...