Scratching the Creative Itch
May. 14th, 2002 11:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_gneechSometimes, there is just a fundamental disconnect between the creative urge, the idea generating machine, and the dictates of reality. As I mentioned yesterday, I've got a big ol' pile of crud to do today, and it's already 11:30. What have I accomplished? Exactly nil, unless you count eating breakfast.
What have I been doing instead? Sitting at my computer, staring at the screen, trying to accomodate a sudden and intense desire to work on my writing ... but I'm not getting anything done there, either, except to get frustrated at my dissatisfaction with the various ideas I've got floating around.
My writing methodology, for lack of a better term, tends to be that I have a germ of an idea, or more often an intriguing character, and I sit down and run with it for a while just to get things moving. Then, once I've got something that seems workable, I start working on building the rest of the story, revising what I have, coming up with more details, and so forth.
That method is not working at all for me, lately, tho. The idea generator has become a bit worn with overuse, I think, and is only producing half-baked ideas. When I send them back to cook a little longer, the idea generator responds, "What you see is what you get. Take it or leave it."
So I've been leaving it.
To some extent, I have lost the sense of "inner reality" for a lot of my writing, and I think that may be an unexpected casualty of the revision process. Once upon a time, I went over ideas in my head so much that what I wrote was more or less engraved in stone by the time it hit the paper, and that gave the parts that came next a solid foundation to rest on.
Now, with revision looming up over me as not only a possibility, but a necessity, suddenly everything's up for grabs, and no idea knows where it stands -- and so no idea is willing to risk development for fear that it will just be tossed out. Characters are afraid to step forward, on the grounds that I might completely alter their nature to fit the requirements of the plot, instead of altering the plot to fit their natures, and so forth.
This is part of the reason I was working so hard on creating a solid, specific world to set my stories in. If I know for a fact that Valthnar is at Point A, the Silver Tower is at Point B, and there are savage lizardmen at Point C directly between them, then if I decide to write about an expedition from Valthnar to the Silver Tower, that they'll have to deal with the savage lizardmen on the way ... not because I want to include savage lizardmen, but because that's what would happen. That sense of reality, is largely what I lose by having everything up for grabs at revision time.
In the words of Tim Powers, "the first draft is supposed to be crap." Revision should be an integral part of the life cycle of any story. But I need to develop a sense of kindness when it comes to my self-editing. Instead of thinking in terms of "This part is good, but this part could use a little work," I think, "This part is UTTER CRAP and ruins the whole story! Throw it out and start over!" And then I groan at all the work I just threw away.
The UTTER CRAP thought destroys all interest I have in a story, and once the interest is lost, it's very hard to regain the enthusiasm necessary to try to salvage the good parts. This is roughly what happened to NeverNever, and has happened to many other things I've worked on in the past. It's particularly tough to salvage something like NN, which was viewed by the public the moment it was thought up ... the stuff I think is utter crap, is probably some fan's favorite moment -- and the seeds of NN's fall go pretty far back into the story. I kept trying to run with NN for so long after the big mistakes were made, that it would almost be easier to just start over from scratch than to fix it. (Which I may do at some point, actually ... we'll just see how it goes.)
I live in a certain amount of paranoid fear of the moment this phenomenon strikes Suburban Jungle, too ... it's come dangerously close a few times already, but I've managed to steer things off in another direction before it happened. Part of the problem is that SJ is such a profoundly personal work, that I have had to deliberately avoid certain storylines that I wanted to do, because of how it might effect the real-world people around me ... and the SJ characters resent that. So far they've forgiven me, but I don't know how far their patience extends on that score.
And just for the record, lest anybody worry about my grasp on reality, I am speaking metaphorically here.
Oh well, that's enough of that. The big ol' pile of crud isn't getting any smaller with me sitting here griping about my writing ... but I do at least feel a little better for having got this stuff out of my head and onto the screen, so I'll consider that an accomplishment and move on.
-The Gneech
What have I been doing instead? Sitting at my computer, staring at the screen, trying to accomodate a sudden and intense desire to work on my writing ... but I'm not getting anything done there, either, except to get frustrated at my dissatisfaction with the various ideas I've got floating around.
My writing methodology, for lack of a better term, tends to be that I have a germ of an idea, or more often an intriguing character, and I sit down and run with it for a while just to get things moving. Then, once I've got something that seems workable, I start working on building the rest of the story, revising what I have, coming up with more details, and so forth.
That method is not working at all for me, lately, tho. The idea generator has become a bit worn with overuse, I think, and is only producing half-baked ideas. When I send them back to cook a little longer, the idea generator responds, "What you see is what you get. Take it or leave it."
So I've been leaving it.
To some extent, I have lost the sense of "inner reality" for a lot of my writing, and I think that may be an unexpected casualty of the revision process. Once upon a time, I went over ideas in my head so much that what I wrote was more or less engraved in stone by the time it hit the paper, and that gave the parts that came next a solid foundation to rest on.
Now, with revision looming up over me as not only a possibility, but a necessity, suddenly everything's up for grabs, and no idea knows where it stands -- and so no idea is willing to risk development for fear that it will just be tossed out. Characters are afraid to step forward, on the grounds that I might completely alter their nature to fit the requirements of the plot, instead of altering the plot to fit their natures, and so forth.
This is part of the reason I was working so hard on creating a solid, specific world to set my stories in. If I know for a fact that Valthnar is at Point A, the Silver Tower is at Point B, and there are savage lizardmen at Point C directly between them, then if I decide to write about an expedition from Valthnar to the Silver Tower, that they'll have to deal with the savage lizardmen on the way ... not because I want to include savage lizardmen, but because that's what would happen. That sense of reality, is largely what I lose by having everything up for grabs at revision time.
In the words of Tim Powers, "the first draft is supposed to be crap." Revision should be an integral part of the life cycle of any story. But I need to develop a sense of kindness when it comes to my self-editing. Instead of thinking in terms of "This part is good, but this part could use a little work," I think, "This part is UTTER CRAP and ruins the whole story! Throw it out and start over!" And then I groan at all the work I just threw away.
The UTTER CRAP thought destroys all interest I have in a story, and once the interest is lost, it's very hard to regain the enthusiasm necessary to try to salvage the good parts. This is roughly what happened to NeverNever, and has happened to many other things I've worked on in the past. It's particularly tough to salvage something like NN, which was viewed by the public the moment it was thought up ... the stuff I think is utter crap, is probably some fan's favorite moment -- and the seeds of NN's fall go pretty far back into the story. I kept trying to run with NN for so long after the big mistakes were made, that it would almost be easier to just start over from scratch than to fix it. (Which I may do at some point, actually ... we'll just see how it goes.)
I live in a certain amount of paranoid fear of the moment this phenomenon strikes Suburban Jungle, too ... it's come dangerously close a few times already, but I've managed to steer things off in another direction before it happened. Part of the problem is that SJ is such a profoundly personal work, that I have had to deliberately avoid certain storylines that I wanted to do, because of how it might effect the real-world people around me ... and the SJ characters resent that. So far they've forgiven me, but I don't know how far their patience extends on that score.
And just for the record, lest anybody worry about my grasp on reality, I am speaking metaphorically here.
Oh well, that's enough of that. The big ol' pile of crud isn't getting any smaller with me sitting here griping about my writing ... but I do at least feel a little better for having got this stuff out of my head and onto the screen, so I'll consider that an accomplishment and move on.
-The Gneech
