"Just Write"

[mark_asphodel]

So I didn't make my goal of having Chapter 13 of "Starchild" out by tonight.  Oh, well... there are a number of personal goals I didn't meet this weekend.  Like buying a new vacuum cleaner.

Part of the problem is that a couple of weeks back, I followed a piece of writing advice that I normally avoid like it's poison.

"Just write.  Don't worry about it being good-- you can edit it later.   Just sit down and write."

Well, I did, and now I have a block of textual crap entitled "Chapter 13"-- or did until I excised that entire block of text like a tumor, dumped it into the slot labeled "Chapter 14" in case I needed to refer to it, and started over.  And since I did try to convince myself I could work with said textual crap, I wasted a lot of time with it.  I guess I could argue that the delay allowed me to refine the sequencing of certain events in Chapters 13 and 14, but I'd like to think I could have gotten there without writing junk text as a self-installed roadblock.

I'm sure that advice has its utility for professionals writing to deadline.  But in the case of someone writing for fun, it has always caused me more harm than good.  

-x-

Also, I did take an Eliwood/Fiora detour, but the junk-text issue was already ongoing when I wrote that.

-x-

Also, the squirrels have raided and feasted upon my carefully-planted canna lilies.  Evil little rodents.

Comments

[sailorvfan10.livejournal.com]

That "just write" advice that practically everyone seems to swear by? Yeah, never worked for me, either. At least not for fiction. It's worked great for essays that I did twelve hours before the due date, but those are essays and I can bullshit my way through those. I can't bullshit through my fanfiction or originals without feeling like it's a cop-out. Although I must say, I started off chapter three of "My Sins" with a random line Marth says at the end of the game (in his talk with Nyna) and then I went through the scene from the end to the beginning (I never work in order it seems). But that's different than writing a text-block of crap. I do that every year--it's called NaNoWriMo. I don't need to do that all the time, you know?

Besides, my inner perfectionist is up my arse until I make it not suck, and sometimes it's just really hard to salvage something from a really bad draft. (My first draft is usually almost always complete rubbish--it's just to get down my ideas in a somewhat coherent manner and that's it. My second draft is where it's at.)

Besides half of the time I just can't think of anything to jot down, and then next thing I know I am finding patterns in Word's background from staring at it so hard.

The thing I usually do when something just isn't working with one fic is I just go on to something else. I have been slowly cranking out that Marth/Merric fic, but whilst I was agonising over chapter three? I finished 90 percent of the fic. I guess it's a form of procrastination, but I have to admit, it helps get the juices flowing.

Squirrels are evil rodents. They're cute and fuzzy to deceive you, and meanwhile they are secretly plotting to kill everything. Back when I used to garden, they liked to, uh, eat everything. That's when I started getting friendly with the local stray cats. That was a particularly smart investment. (There was a squirrel population problem in my hometown anyway due to the huge amount of trees. They were EVEYWHERE, and for every tree there were like twenty squirrels. There were at least fifty trees on my block. ...Yeah.)

Also they somehow got into the walls of our house, so when our hamster went out on an adventure, chewed a hole into the wall, and went exploring? My brother was going to kill every last squirrel if they ate her. (We found her safe and sound, but he still wanted to kill the squirrels, because they liked to try to burrow through the walls and into the living quarters.)

Also I read 'canna lilies' as 'canas lilies' on first readthrough, which was an interesting mental image, to say the least.

[mark-asphodel.livejournal.com]

Canas Lilies. Hah.

There is a Camas Lily, aka a Death Camas... take that one any way you please.

Most of the time, I have a really, really good idea of what "needs" to go on the page before I even sit down. Like,
"Wings of Love"? That was a first draft. I sat down, unloaded the contents of my head, and posted it.

The key thing is, I knew what I wanted. I wasn't writing just to fill up the page.

[sailorvfan10.livejournal.com]

Ooh, deadly flowers~

Most of the time, I have a really, really good idea of what "needs" to go on the page before I even sit down.
Yeah, usually I have a general idea of what should be written, so that's usually what my first draft consists of. Then I can fill in the other stuff in the subsequent drafts. But to write just to write? Yeah, it's never worked for me.