Thoughts on Writing #45: You Brilliant Hack You.

[seanan_mcguire]

At last we have reached the forty-fifth essay in my series of fifty essays on the artistic masochism that is the act of writing. Considering this whole thing was an accident, I think I'm going rather well. All fifty of these essays are based around my original fifty thoughts on writing, which means I am blessedly, mercifully, almost done. And

Comments

[mariadkins]

i'm hacking brilliant! :P

[seanan_mcguire]

Yes, dear.

[hasufin]

I love that pic.

[murgyt]

"...It's time to talk about the angel and the ape, and how we are ..."

I feel like I'm missing something here. Am I?

[scifantasy]

Well, I don't know exactly what Seanan was getting at, but the quotation is from Pratchett: Humans are "the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape."

[tibicina]

I believe the next paragraph was actually from her last essay in this series, so I think something got copy-pasted/edited incorrectly. Hopefully it will be fixed come morning.

[seanan_mcguire]

I fixed the glitch in the re-post, and it should make a little more sense now.

[inkgrrl]

My sensei calls this the god/wormshit cycle. Personally I get uncomfortable when I'm told I'm brilliant, as I start thinking I have to live up to something... like, "crap, what am I gonna have to pull out of my ass next to impress this person?" Hack, on the other hand, I like. Means I'm getting paid ;-)

[seanan_mcguire]

Oh, word. I freak out when I get praised too much.

[robling_t]

I think the pejorative implied by "hack" is the suggestion that the deadline is the more important element, as opposed to the actual work; "we need to set three column inches at 5 on Thursday or rocks will fall and nobody will eat this week, so what it actually is doesn't matter so much" -- like filibustering by reading the phone-book, because the measure being used is the "wrong" measure (say, volume not weight?). It gets tangled up into absolutes about working-speed because the popular image of stuff produced under those conditions doesn't cover the outliers who do naturally self-edit well under pressure...

[seanan_mcguire]

Right, exactly.

[manwe_iluvendil]

I totally feel you. After two years of world-building and backstory prep, four years of deciding on the medium, and thirteen years of working out the story in my head, I'm finally plugging along on book #1. I'm only getting a few pages out a day, which is a little disappointing, but my momentum is unprecedented.

UNPRECEDENTED.

[seanan_mcguire]

Good for you!