I'm thinking of thinking of...well, work, actually.

[squeequeg]

sen_no_ongaku_'s recent (or not so recent, by Internet time) post about how he composes got me thinking. Scary as that prospect is, I've written up some of my thoughts on creative methods and am now inflicting them on you. But since I'm nice, here's a cut-tag.
sen_no_ongaku discusses, among other things, two different pieces of advice he's been given: one to make himself sit down and compose, which is often at odds with his usual methods, and one to simply find his own "compositional temperament" and maximize the work done in that temperament. (Please correct me if I've paraphrased wrong.)

At first this got me thinking about my daily goal of writing 1K or revising one chapter (at the least), which seems to place me squarely in the former category. However, when I think about the short stories I've written, I tend to be happier with the ones that I've written all in one go. For me, short stories come in one of two ways: either I scrawl down the outline and compose it quickly at the computer, then revise the hell out of it; or I write it out longhand over a few weeks, type it up, then revise the hell out of it. (You'll note the common step there. That's a given no matter what I work on.)

In the first instance, I'm usually very happy with the story and even have to set it aside for a while so that I can view it with objective eyes. In the second, though, by the time I finish the story longhand -- certainly by the time I've typed it up -- I'm sick of it, can find all the stupid/careless/implausible bits, and don't want anything to do with it. This would seem to imply that my best starts -- not necessarily my best work -- aren't of the incremental, 1K words a day kind.

I've started to accommodate this in how I work. For example, even though I'm in the middle of revising Spiral Hunt, I've stopped several times to get a new story drafted. In those cases when I stopped work on the short story to focus more on Spiral Hunt, I've gotten very much stalled even when I have time to go back to it. ("This is Not My Beautiful House" is in the middle of a 'what the hell happens now?' moment, and probably will be stuck there till mid-April at least.)

All of this is tangential to the current work I'm doing: revising something for which the original inspiration was years ago. I guess one of the things I'm learning about my own creative style is that the day-to-day work, the thousand words etc., means that I keep getting better at the craft of writing, so that when the Muse or Beast or daemon whacks me with an idea, I can put it into a story more easily. I'm fairly sure that my omnipresent guilt-complex has only partially affected my desire to put in some work every day.

I agree that one of the things that keeps me from actually putting something down on paper is the fear that I won't get it right, that the potential in the idea will be lost in the clutter that arises when I write. To some degree I've come to terms with this: no story that I've written has ever been as good as those first few flashes in my head. What I try to do now is to either get the story as close to that original as possible, or, if it starts growing in another direction, follow it there and try to make it as good as possible in that new way.

However, I know that I've "lost" several stories by talking about them or noodling around with them too much before actually writing them. In those cases, I think either I've used up that first narrative burst in enthusing about it to others (and damn, that's hard not to do; if I have a great idea, I wanna talk about it!) or I've gone straight from entranced with the story to cynical about it -- without the important step of writing the actual draft. Without that draft, all I have is the memory of an idea that might have been good, or might have sucked.

I wonder how much of this differs between writing fiction and writing music (or, for that matter, writing poetry and writing fiction; the few poems I write tend to be all in one burst and then set aside for quite a while before I even look at them again).

Comments

[stealthmuffin.livejournal.com]

sorry for the late response...

I have trouble with the rolling rewrite for some of the reasons you mention -- but also because I tend to outline stories in advance, even the spur-of-the-moment ones. The winding my way through the plot is usually before anything's put on paper (or for novels, before anything more than just notes are down).

The actual musician persons are very cool. (If you come to Boston, you can meet them! and singers! and conductors, if she's up from Westminster!) If I can, I'll try to get a recording of sen_no_ongaku's "Four Cats" and one of thomascantor playing Part (dammit, can't get the umlaut on that) and send them along.

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

I guess one of the things I'm learning about my own creative style is that the day-to-day work, the thousand words etc., means that I keep getting better at the craft of writing, so that when the Muse or Beast or daemon whacks me with an idea, I can put it into a story more easily.

Yes!!!!! I know exactly what you mean here.

For my part, I go through periods when I draft a poem a day (usually no more than a month at a go, though once it was a whole season) and periods when the poems seem distant and unreachable. But I try to do some work on my writing, if not daily, then several times a week -- revise poems, work on an essay, throw my back into a good blog post. Because I think that the more I practice the craft of writing, the better-honed my skills will be, which means that next time a poem idea comes into my head I'll have better odds of being able to actually create on the page what I imagine the poem wants to be.

This post from you is very well-timed; today I am working on a poetry manuscript (the second book-length collection, though it may well be the first one published, who knows) and am feeling very writerly. :-)

[stealthmuffin.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I think this may be one of the few things I consciously carried away from the "Care and Feeding of Your Beast" part of Viable Paradise. (Though I did allow myself to pace around the house for an hour talking to myself, and found that's an excellent way of working out a plot point. Funny how it's still work when it doesn't look like it.)

Good luck with the manuscript! By the way, I have a copy of Realms of Fantasy that I'd like to send you (for reasons you know). Should I just mail it down or find another way to send it?

[2h2o.livejournal.com]

I think my style is similar to yours in many ways. Part of the reason that I haven't written more is that even if I really like an idea, the urgency to do anything with it is often fleeting. My best writing is definitely done in flow, when I'm not even thinking ahead but merely reacting to the contours of the idea. And even when I have written something, the process of revising it never feels inspired, and I typically leave it unfinished. I also get distracted by tangential ideas that emerge while I'm working on one project, and sometimes run off to work on that rather than whatever I was "supposed" to be doing.
This summer I think I'll try the 1k/day program and see if it leads anywhere.

[stealthmuffin.livejournal.com]

I also get distracted by tangential ideas that emerge while I'm working on one project, and sometimes run off to work on that rather than whatever I was "supposed" to be doing.

This used to absolutely kill some of my stories. I'd be revising away, have a great idea, and never get back to the first project. These days I'm a little better -- I jot down notes if something hits me upside the head, and if I have to I set aside time for it in the knowledge that I'll have to come back to work. But then again, there are so many other distractions out there...

[minyan.livejournal.com]

or I write it out longhand over a few weeks, type it up, then revise the hell out of it.

I'm finding that writing longhand can have its uses - sometimes I can begin to jot scenes during odd minutes, like the half-hour I spent on a park bench before class today, and typing the handwritten scenes means I've rewritten the piece at least once by the time it gets on screen. But I write much slower than I type. Writing by hand works in short bursts, on those rare occasions when a story looms over me and shouts at me to write it. When the story seeps more slowly into th back of my mind, its helpful to have the kind of intense focus I can (on good days) find by turning on low music and pounding at the keys. I haven't consistently put multipel hours a day into the novel - more like a day on the novel a day doing poetry homework, a day writing the memoir for the landscape class, a day revising the story for the contest... so I know what you mean about taking breaks.

I've also found that the novel moves at different speeds. In my first week here, I spent a couple of hours a day writing character background sketches. Last semester I bowled through something like 40 pages in a couple of months. This semester I've been writing and rewriting maybe 20 pages, trying to get a firmer handle on the character dynamics. It's taken me about 150 pages to get enough sense of the people and the story arcs that I can go back and reread and start to fill in missing conflict, get the momentum going. I'm beginning to see the black shapes of real scenes hovering under the pretty painted first drafts.

Which is a heady feeling. I hear you about the first flash of an idea that you can never quite reach. But I think - I hope - there may be even deeper places to get to, if I do the work right. The great thing about being here, really, has been having people whack me so that I face up to those scenes.

Thanks for this post! It's good to think about.

[stealthmuffin.livejournal.com]

Writing longhand is one of those things that I'll never be able to break myself of. For one thing, if you have a notebook with you, you always have something to do. For another, it's been very useful for rough work -- character sketches, notes on the sociological effects of magic, things I've learned about X, that sort of thing.

I agree that a lot of it has to do with writing speed. The more the idea has me, the faster I try to write and the worse my handwriting gets. I also think you're right about the forced focus that working on the computer brings. Maybe that's why I get more done there (when I'm not noodling on LJ, of course).

I love that feeling of seeing the story beneath what's written. I feel it sometimes when I'm going through a draft, leaving ink on every page, and then coming across a bit that's actually pretty good. That warm glow counteracts some of the dullness of revision very nicely.