Writing, Drafts, Revisions, etc.

[the_moonmoth]

As those of you who follow me on tumblr probably saw, over the last couple of weeks there has been a lot of wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth over trying to piece together the final chapter of The Ewer of Enheduanna. I thought I'd write a bit about it because sorting it out was an interesting process for me.

So I recently did a meme on

Comments

[rahirah]

Heh, I'm glad that my obsessive fiddling turned out to be useful. :D

once a scene is written/a fic is completed/etc. I really struggle to see alternative ways of presenting the action

This was very much the way I was when I first started writing. To me, once I'd written a scene, that was the way it happened. It was like part of me believed that I was channeling real events from somewhere rather than making shit up. The day I got my first really substantial critique, which required me to make structural changes in a story rather than just tweaking a line here or there, it broke my brain, but in a good way. It forced me to see a story as a bunch of different elements, all of which could be rearranged or swapped out at need.

I think the wildest revisions I ever did was one which went through about nine different drafts, mainly due to the intransigence of a collaborator (this was in Elfquest fandom, where, since we were all writing in the same setting with each other's original characters, we had to run our stories past the owners of each character we used before it could be printed in the zine. If someone said "No, my character wouldn't do that," you had to re-write it. Which could be a godawful pain at times.) This particular story went from being a five thousand word fluffy bedroom farce to a fifteen thousand word angst-ridden psychological exploration of guilt, all because one person kept saying, "No, my character wouldn't do that," without telling me what they actually WOULD do...

[the_moonmoth]

The day I got my first really substantial critique, which required me to make structural changes in a story rather than just tweaking a line here or there, it broke my brain, but in a good way. It forced me to see a story as a bunch of different elements, all of which could be rearranged or swapped out at need.

Yeah, it's a really, really useful skill to have beaten into you. I've been doing the fanfic thing for 12-13 years now and this is the first time I've ever come up against something like this, which is... not ideal. But I'm glad it happened. I have two stories I'd like to write at some point that both have no firm structure in my head as of yet, and I feel a bit more confident about tackling them now, knowing that I can change things around like that if I need to...