i wouldn't call it time well spent

[erika]

I think I've finally realized why I was having such a massive block on my creativity/coming up with ideas/writer's block in general.

I thought of creativity as a zero-sum game: if I 'waste' my creativity on a bad idea, then I won't have any when I actually want to come up with a bad idea——it's not like looking at a given situation as inspiration could help me learn to look at other situations for inspiration, or anything like that.

Similarly, I seemed to believe that if I 'waste' my writing energies on something I end up not liking, then I have gained nothing of value from it, and there is no way to reuse any of it.

... thinking of it this way now seems so very obviously ridiculous, but christ, what insidious thoughts!

Comments

[untonuggan]

This is a big thing for me, because often things don't work quite the way I want them to but I usually learn important things from the non-working projects about why they didn't work. So yes, yay you!

P.S. But I always forget when I'm actually writing.

[erika]

I just need to ACTUALLY BELIEVE this and then maybe I'll write more, as it is now I halfway think "but I'll USE IT UP AND THEN IT'LL BE ALL GONE."

[enemyofperfect]

Oh, ouch, that's a particularly nasty trap for your brain to have set for you. I mean, I actively believe that bad writing is how you get to good writing, and I still have the hardest time time convincing myself to take the risk of writing something that might be -- shock, horror -- flawed. How much worse if you're thinking of the good and the bad as directly competing, though!

[erika]

I know! When I realized this I was absolutely shocked. The funny thing is that I ... just got in this habit of writing really, really good first drafts, and if I didn't think I could do that, I didn't write.

It didn't help that I usually turned in my first draft in school and got As. I have basically never revised anything in my life. LE FUCK.

[seekingferret]

Revision is hard, and I am not good at it. Some (fairly obvious) techniques I've found helpful:

-Reading a story aloud. Gives me a different feel for how the words actually flow together, and forces me to not skip over sections or assume a detail is there because it was there in my head.

-Finding good beta readers/editors. This is also really hard, but if you find them, it's so valuable. There's nothing as good for improving your writing as someone willing to tear it apart and show you the details.

-Taking time away from the story before revising. Typically at least a month. I don't always have this luxury, but when I do it gives me the confidence that someone other than the exact person who wrote those words still likes them, or shows me the parts that don't work unless you remember exactly why you wrote them.

-Color-coding your story by themes or motifs or scenes or characters. I've only done this a couple times, but it was helpful in spotting moments where something was out of place or imbalanced or missing.

[enemyofperfect]

Ahahaha yes, this, this is my curse. I don't know how to make things good, you know? I know how to make things; and when the things I make are good, that works out reasonably well. But I don't really know how to take something that isn't good yet and make it better. Basically my entire strategy for everything in life consists of two simple steps: 1. Throw something together. 2. Hope.

I'm incredibly lucky, obviously, that the results of this rudimentary process sometimes produce things that other people deem acceptable, or even praiseworthy. But at the same time, it's actually... a really helpless feeling. Because while I apparently possess the capability to produce work that's pretty worthwhile, it's not an ability I feel like I have a lot of control over. What I come up with is either good enough or it isn't, and if it isn't, I have absolutely no idea where to go from there.

[erika]

Yes, exaaaactly. If what I make is shit, I... ignore it. la la la.

IMPROVE it? Why would I do that? It's crap.

Nevermind that it's impossible to produce sparkling jewels of perfection in any creative form on any sort of actual more-than-biannually basis. IF THING = BAD, THING = DESTROYED.

[enemyofperfect]

Nevermind that it's impossible to produce sparkling jewels of perfection in any creative form on any sort of actual more-than-biannually basis.

Hence my username. Perfectionism has done more to mess up my life than... I don't even know. A lot of things.

Half the time I can't even cope with things that are pretty good, but don't yet meet my (excessively inflated?) standards. Like, I can (sometimes) look at a thing and recognize the fact that it isn't absolutely 100% awful, but I'm still -- frozen. It exists, but in a flawed state! WHAT DO I EVEN DO NOW.

fucking life, how does it work

[seekingferret]

That trap is one of the reasons why I love NaNoWriMo, because you have a group of people actively cheering you on as you write bad writing. You can tell them "I wrote two thousand words of gibberish last night. The plot has a huge hole in it and the characters change from page to page." And they'll say "Two thousand words! That's awesome! You can fix the plot holes in December."

[erika]

You know, I did win Nanowrimo in 2008 (maybe 2007, not sure), but ... the fact that I ended up with a completely unusable piece of crap story bothered me.

Although I did manage to write over 3000 words about a man making an egg for a challenge. That's something.

[seekingferret]

Eh... none of my NaNo stories have seen wide circulation. Most have only been passed to one or two friends who were curious and who I was willing to show my bad writing to. But I don't feel that the result was an unusable crap story.

Firstly, there have been small excerpts from my stories that have worked and which I have shared more widely. And secondly, I learned a hell of a lot about writing by forcing myself to do a lot more of it than I typically do in a short period of a time. My NaNo novels are terrible fiction, but they're great experiments in how to write fiction.

My most successfully experimental fanfic, the one I wrote last year for Yuletide, draws from A LOT of the techniques that I tried out in NaNo. That story only works because I did Nano.

And 3000 words about making an egg is awesome.