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]

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.