On today’s edition of “Unpacking the black box of ‘writing skill’”:
I’m beginning to get better at recognizing when a story idea won’t work or isn’t ready to be written.
I’ve always been one of those writers who has at least 3x as many half-finished, abandoned WIPs as finished things. Because I get all these ideas I want to write, but then I start working on them and I can’t figure out where it’s going or how it ends or what I’m doing. I often get really frustrated and hung up because of this.
It’s frustrating because it has always made me feel like my writing is out of my control: that it’s pure luck or some magical subconscious process that dictates whether I will get to finish a given story or not, and that I have no power over it. It’s frustrating because
when I fight and fight and can’t finish a story, it feels like a huge waste of time and energy. (It’s not, really; it’s all useful practice regardless of whether it gets finished or not. But truth and feeling are often different things.)
I’ve got so many ideas I COULD be writing. How do I know whether a given one is one that’ll go somewhere? Or even better, how do I MAKE it into an idea that will go somewhere?
These questions have answers! It’s one of the many skill sets we throw into the box and label ‘writing talent’ without really thinking too hard about the fact that what we call ‘writing’ is actually a HUGE ARRAY of different skills, that all go into producing a final work.
Young writers especially are often blind to the aspects of writing they possess natural talent at, and assume that if theirs are not among the obvious ones, then they don’t possess any at all. But perhaps you have a natural talent for this particular skill that you may be taking for granted! I do not. It’s taken me a long time and a lot of frustration to get to the point where I can be honest and self-aware with myself and identify, “This story is not moving forward because in fact I don’t actually know what I’m doing with it. I’m enchanted with the idea, but that’s not the same as having the story that goes with it.”
And upon making that identification–and only then–do I gain the power to say, “Okay, so I need to think this through and figure out what I’m really doing with it and where I want it to go. And if I can’t yet, then obviously this is not the story to be writing at this point in time.” Or alternatively, to say, “This is all I know about this idea, and I’ll write what I’ve got in my head and move on, because I like it even though I know it’s only half-formed.”
Only then do I gain the power to dictate the stories I want to write, as opposed to what my subconscious chooses to throw up at me.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2dYuQol