what you have to do is trust your own story
Whenever he told the story, Rat had a tendency to stop now and then, interrupting the flow, inserting little bits of clarification or bits of analysis or personal opinion. It was a bad habit, Mitchell Sanders said, because all that matters is the raw material, the stuff itself, and you can't clutter it up with your own half-baked commentary. That just breaks the spell. It destroys the magic. What you have to do, Sanders said, is trust your own story. Get the hell out of the way and let it tell itself.
~from "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien (p. 106)
I keep meaning to transcribe large bits of this story and not getting to it, and I'm not getting to it today either, but this struck me, as I'm doing my editing, how often I get in my own way, and how even six and a half years into writing regularly, I'm still doing it, and how hard it can be sometimes to just trust the story, trust the readers to get the story.
~*~
~from "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong," The Things They Carried, Tim O'Brien (p. 106)
I keep meaning to transcribe large bits of this story and not getting to it, and I'm not getting to it today either, but this struck me, as I'm doing my editing, how often I get in my own way, and how even six and a half years into writing regularly, I'm still doing it, and how hard it can be sometimes to just trust the story, trust the readers to get the story.
~*~