I'm sitting here at the writing desk thinking about the short story I want to start, and I'm struggling. My brain is telling me to relax and read this morning, and save the writing for tonight after work. It's an age-old struggle, man versus himself, and this morning my procrastination voice is particularly strong.
I'd guess that's because I spent three hours last night writing the contest story, and my "free time" monitor is going haywire. There's this part of my brain that resents anything that resembles work when I'm on my own time. It's a terrible influence on me, and if I let it get the best of me it will be three months before I know what happened and I'll be back here posting another restart blog. I'm tired of doing that, so instead of giving in to the lazy bastard that lives in my brain, I figured I'd jump on a different task - blogging.
I very much want to start both a blogging streak and a creative writing streak. Yesterday would be day one for both, so I'm going to openly setting my goal here.
Goal: Starting yesterday, I will write and post a blog every day, write at least 1000 words creatively every day, and count the streak for both.
There, goal set. I'll use the blog to record the streak and keep myself accountable. I've tried this before, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't try again. Try, try, until you succeed, right?
Meanwhile, I have a whole new critical voice issue to deal with - submitting for publication, or just publishing stuff myself.
I'm actually writing and finishing stories, and I'm not feeling the need to edit them to death, which is good. I've taken to what Dean Wesley Smith and others call "cycling," which means going back through your writing as you write it and making small corrections and adjustments. Here's how that works.
I'll write until I start to feel fatigued. Now, in the past, that would mean I'd be done for the day, but the contest has me on deadlines, so that wasn't possible. Turns out, that's a good thing. Instead of walking away and doing something else, I take a short break, refresh whatever I'm drinking, and then go back to read the last session's writing, usually about a thousand words, maybe a little more. I fix typos, maybe adjust a sentence or two that doesn't sound right, and within ten minutes or less I'm back to where I left off and ready to resume writing another thousand words or so.
It's a good feeling, and when I'm done with a story, the copy is very clean. I do go back over the whole thing once more, mostly for typos. Last night, the contest story took me about a half hour to do the final run through, but that was because I had to cut 200 words. Normally, it seems to take me about twice my normal reading speed, so no more than ten minutes per thousand words.
For whatever it's worth, the cutting was not a good feeling, but it probably made the story stronger. Because I was writing to a word limit, there was stuff in the first half of the story that I wanted to use in the second half, but word count limitations dictated otherwise, so most of the words that I cut were things that ended up not being important to the final version. Without the word count limit, it's hard to say if cutting those words would have made sense. There were probably a few spots where I could have tightened up the sentences, but because I felt the word limit crunch towards the end of the story, I left out a lot and stayed strictly on a single conflict resolution.
I suppose in a short story, narrowing the scope makes the story stronger. It's good practice, and maybe that's why so many writers start learning the craft with short fiction. Being able to only write what is pertinent to the story is a skill in an of itself, and one more easily learned through short fiction, I'd guess.
Anyway, the point is, I'm doing a better job following Heinlein's Rules 2 & 3, "You must finish what you write," and, "You must not edit except to editorial order." I never liked line edits much, anyway. I always prefer to write it well the first time and then cut for clarity, but some old college writing courses had me thinking a line-by-line edit was the most important part of writing the story. There are plenty of authors who spend years editing a single novel.
No thanks. That's not fun, nor do I feel like it's necessary if you are trying to write well from the get go. If anything, cutting the story down last night felt like I was trying to make it sound like someone else had written it. I was removing parts of what make the story sound like I wrote it, which is to say I was removing my voice in spots purely to meet word count.
That's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but imagine if you spent twice as much time editing something as you did writing it! You'd be trying to make it so clean that any shred of your voice would be gone almost entirely, which might leave a decent story, but it would sound like anyone could have written it. No thanks. I enjoy the authors I enjoy not because of the plot or even the resolutions they have, but because of the way they develop their characters and the way their writing feels and sounds. You know when you are reading Stephen King or Dean Wesley Smith or J.R.R. Tolkien because they have distinct styles, and editing a story to be "clean" can remove much of that style. I'll pass.
Granted, my style is still developing. I need to focus on Heinlein's Rule #1: "You must write." That's what the streak goal I set today is for. But I also have to start working on Rules # 4 & 5: "You must put your work on the market," and, "You must keep it on the market until it sells."
But first, let me get through a seven day writing and blogging streak. Once that is done, this weekend I will sort out my submission and publication process.
Well, I'm awake now. Time for some coffee and breakfast, followed by a shower. At that point, I'll have an hour or so before I have to leave for work, nd I'll sit down and start this short story that I've false started more times than I can count. By tomorrow, I hope to have the story written and out of my system at last.
Have a good day. See you later.
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