Good advice
A goodly number of bad suggestions got aired in the last discussion, along with comments on the untrustworthiness of general advice if one senses one's process is different, but feels obliged to forced oneself to conform.
What might be useful is to talk about specific instances of good advice--the kind that came at the right time, and really made a difference.
Obviously not all incidents are going to be applicable to everybody, but at least I've found that paying attention to others' processes, as they struggle for mastery, can help me in my own fumble toward competence.
So I'm hoping anyone reading this will share a time when a piece of advice really made a big difference--and how that worked.
Here's the first one that really made a difference for me. This was learning the painful lesson that the intensity with which I wrote something (including, maybe even especially, the White Fire Projects, those rare ones that just write themselves while my brain is mostly living there instead of here) does not automatically translate to the page. I had to learn to wait for rewriting until the intensity died down before I could commence my usual struggle to see past the images to what I actually wrote.
This was tied to the discovery that I was a visual writer. The good part of that is that when everything is flowing I get to see a movie in my head, shot in sensurround, and I often play soundtrack music to enhance the experience. Many of my pieces are thus tied to specific bits of music. The bad part is that when I write really fast, living the story, the prose I use is maybe adequate at best. Run on sentences, crazy quilt sentence structures, dull word choices--usually with one word showing up 587 times within 2 paragraphs. That was at best. Far more frequently, a sentence from an intensely lived piece, say, something like She came to the door brought instant images of a worn, scratched door, finger prints around the polished brass latch, dog nose prints at ankle height. 'She' leans in the doorway peering out, a faint tension in her brow, a loose strand of hair caught in the lashes of her right eye, but she's so preoccupied she doesn't feel or see it. The smell coming from behind her is of baking bread; the smell outside is wet wood and damp soil from the recent rain.
When I first learned to glimpse past the images instead of blithely assuming it's all magically there for the reader, cluestick, meet skull. Of course no one reading that sentence is going to see the scene without a hint or two, and they certainly aren't going to feel the tension presaging the appearance of a villain on the next page, just because I felt it when writing it.
So, how about you?
What might be useful is to talk about specific instances of good advice--the kind that came at the right time, and really made a difference.
Obviously not all incidents are going to be applicable to everybody, but at least I've found that paying attention to others' processes, as they struggle for mastery, can help me in my own fumble toward competence.
So I'm hoping anyone reading this will share a time when a piece of advice really made a big difference--and how that worked.
Here's the first one that really made a difference for me. This was learning the painful lesson that the intensity with which I wrote something (including, maybe even especially, the White Fire Projects, those rare ones that just write themselves while my brain is mostly living there instead of here) does not automatically translate to the page. I had to learn to wait for rewriting until the intensity died down before I could commence my usual struggle to see past the images to what I actually wrote.
This was tied to the discovery that I was a visual writer. The good part of that is that when everything is flowing I get to see a movie in my head, shot in sensurround, and I often play soundtrack music to enhance the experience. Many of my pieces are thus tied to specific bits of music. The bad part is that when I write really fast, living the story, the prose I use is maybe adequate at best. Run on sentences, crazy quilt sentence structures, dull word choices--usually with one word showing up 587 times within 2 paragraphs. That was at best. Far more frequently, a sentence from an intensely lived piece, say, something like She came to the door brought instant images of a worn, scratched door, finger prints around the polished brass latch, dog nose prints at ankle height. 'She' leans in the doorway peering out, a faint tension in her brow, a loose strand of hair caught in the lashes of her right eye, but she's so preoccupied she doesn't feel or see it. The smell coming from behind her is of baking bread; the smell outside is wet wood and damp soil from the recent rain.
When I first learned to glimpse past the images instead of blithely assuming it's all magically there for the reader, cluestick, meet skull. Of course no one reading that sentence is going to see the scene without a hint or two, and they certainly aren't going to feel the tension presaging the appearance of a villain on the next page, just because I felt it when writing it.
So, how about you?