Part 2 in My Writing Process
Like I said, at some point in the plot bunny/planning stage, I decide to start writing.
When can vary. Sometimes the planning stage happens so quickly and/or subconsciously that as far as I’m concerned, writing is the first thing I do.
I don’t always start in the right place, and that’s okay. I think of a place where it seems plausible the story might start, and begin writing that. Partway through I may either shunt that further down the page for a later scene and try again, or stumble across the right beginning a scene or two later.
My MO is to go for half-assed first lines. ”The first line must be great!” is a crock. No great first line will ever go down in history the way “It was a dark and stormy night…” has (look up that entire line, it’s a paragraph long and it’s MAGNIFICENT in the worst way). I tried ‘great first lines’ when I was younger, but at this stage in my life I am comfortable with whatever the hell gets things moving.
So, now I’m on the move, writing stuff. Now I begin fighting myself. My bad habits: second-guessing myself and being indecisive about what I want to have happen next (“I like this idea…but also this idea…could I just write and see what happens?” Answer: wishy-washy non-commital crap happens); and refusing to move on till I’ve found ANYTHING LESS THAN THE PERFECT WORD (which no one but me cares about or even notices).
I have learned, recently, a little bit more about how I am allowed to wildly suck in the first drafts. Intellectually I always knew this, but it is also a feeling in your bones. You don’t REALLY know it until you have learned what it FEELS like to be free to suck.
And then you have to hold onto it, because much like special interest lobbying groups, other portions of your writing brain will always be at work trying to chip away at your liberties.
Everyone who advocates for giving yourself permission to suck is 1000% right. As long you get the barest, ugliest, roughest shapes of what you eventually want a scene to become, you can go back later and make it OMG BEAUTIFUL. This turns out to be SO MUCH EASIER than struggling with the damn thing so that it comes out perfect in the first place.
But IT’S NOT EASY TO ACTUALLY GET THERE when you’re in the habit of being perfectionist. It’s all-out war in your writer brain, like you’re staging a revolution against the autocratic rule of Inner Critic and its well-armed police forces.
I’m here, lately. This stage slows me down something fierce and leads to savage procrastination. When I sit there with my fingers on the keyboard and think, “I can’t write, nothing is happening,” it is most often because my own brain is crushing every thought and possibility I come up with, often before it even has a chance to glimmer into the light of the sun. I look for things to distract myself with, I think with the subconscious that if I don’t think about it, then maybe I won’t squeeze myself so hard and then something will happen.
Sometimes sleep deprivation works, or alcohol or other things that impair the ability to reason and offer self-critique. But altered states of conscious are not the healthy way to go in the long term. The only way to truly deal with the problem is to confront the Inner Critic and win.
But it’s so exhausting to deal with that I’m having to struggle against it killing off any desire I have to write at all. Sometimes I just hate everything I write, because all I can see is how it doesn’t live up to…I don’t even know what, honestly. Some half-seen Platonic ideal of my story. I keep seeking advice for this, but it seems to boil down to: keep fighting to forgive yourself for not being perfect, and if it comes to it, decide whether it’s worth it to you to bother continuing to try to write or not.
Other problems/scenarios I often encounter when writing:
1: I find I’m starting to bore myself, or wondering when a scene is going to end: this is a sure sign for me that I’m Doing It Wrong. The thing to do here is to skip down and try a new version of the scene. It tends to work better the second time. Or third. Or sometimes fourth. Or I ask myself whether I need it at all or if there’s some way in which I could avoid having to write it. If none of these, I seek a beta. Sometimes a chance to talk it out is what’s needed.
2: The Wall. You may know this one. There’s no way forward. There’s a smooth 20 foot tall wall in front of you in your mind, extending to the horizon in both directions, and you know your job is to get to the other side, but there are no handholds and nowhere to go. It feels like that kind of useless immobile inertia.
At this point, I know I made a wrong turn and this is not where I was supposed to be in the first place.
To fix this, I have to go back and revise as much of the story as it takes. It’s full-on editing mode to bring the whole story so far into an advanced draft state, to find my wrong turn and bring things in line with what SHOULD be happening. In there somewhere I will find the moment at which someone said the wrong thing, made the wrong decision or where I did not get into the character’s emotional headspace sufficiently to get them heading in the right direction (some actors are method actors; I am a method writer).
Some people can write straight through from beginning to end, and then revise after that. Not me. Sub-consciously I am tracking the moving targets of the story and where it will go based on what has happened so far, and The Wall is my brain stopping me because I have made a call that will send everything crashing far off track into a story I no longer want to write.
Possibly I could avoid this by outlining better.
Speaking of which! ON TO THE NEXT PART.