Rookie Mistakes

[bodlon]

For the last week and change, I’ve been working almost exclusively on a single story. In its final draft I anticipate that it’s going to clock in at about 3,500 words. Being halfway through the heavy lifting of the second draft, I can say that I think it’s going to be a readable and satisfying 3,500 words. But oh, has this week highlighted some major problems in my process.

To start, I did not go into this knowing what I was doing. Now, I’ve worked hard on and been proud of things that came out of nowhere, but starting this story was the writing equivalent of storming out of the room in a fit of pique.

I didn’t know my characters, or how the story went, or anything at all. So I improvised. I grabbed some characters I already had in my head and made do. This was great fun because these are people I wanted to get to know anyway, but it had a massive side-effect of leading me in entirely the wrong direction. By day three, I was reduced to swearing and pacing because — argh! — I was either telling the wrong sort of story with the right people, or the right sort of story for the wrong people.

So I re-cast the lot of them.

This worked enormously well. I knew now the sorts of people I needed to do what, and where. I didn’t know all the whys, but I knew the trajectory I wanted more or less. I spent a lot of time re-writing what I already had to accommodate these new people before I got into the new prose.

Which was awesome. I was happy. My plan was working! Except that while I now knew who I was writing well enough, I didn’t actually know where my story was going. Which, honestly, you’d think I’d realize before day seven on a short piece, but apparently I am not the brains of the operation this month.

It is hard to look at a week of work and acknowledge that the problem with it is that I’ve spent a week doing the literary equivalent of feeling around for my keys in the dark with the light switch well within reach. A lot of the joy in writing for me is that process of discovery. I want to find out what happens next, so I make things happen.

Except in this case I was having to go through every possibility until I struck upon the right one, and many of the bits I was telling wrong in the original draft were still wrong. Not as wrong, salvageable in a couple of cases, but still wrong.

Last night, I took a string and tied it to point A of my draft, followed it through what I had, and then tied it to point B. And then, because it was the right thing to do, I took a claw hammer to everything that didn’t belong to that string and ripped it out. And that felt good, though it means I’m going through the whole story and basically re-writing it. Again.

When I look at the past nine days, what I get from the experience is a good reminder that structure isn’t the enemy. Too much structure (i.e. knowing everything and then slavishly obeying it) can be, though that’s mostly because my brain says that I’ve already written my story, and that it wants to move on to the next thing. Still, hauling off with no sense of where I’m going and why is equally dumb because it’s tiring. I have to do four times the amount of work I should be doing, and there’s no way I can write a book like this and still finish while I’m alive.

So yes, I’ll be glad to see the other side of this one, if only because it makes me want to do the next one in better, smarter ways.

This post has been mirrored from Christian A. Young's Dimlight Archive. To see it in its original format, visit dimlightarchive.com