jedusaur

I just finished a book called "Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting" by Robert McKee that articulated something I've been trying to say for a long time about writing and rewriting.

So there's this piece of advice on just about every writing advice list ever that goes: don't worry about quality, just spit out a crappy first draft and make it good when you rewrite. I've known for years that this doesn't apply to me. When I write something without worrying about how good it is, and then try to turn it into something good, I can't. I just start hating the project altogether and wind up giving up on it.

The prevailing advice on that issue is: let go of your words. Figure out what you're really saying, what's important about each scene, and start over with that in mind. Don't hang onto individual sentences or phrasings just because you like them. Find your story, and rewrite with the story in mind. And that makes sense, for someone whose process of figuring out their story requires writing it, as I gather many people's do. Mine doesn't. I can't write my story until I know what it is.

This book I just read advocates my way. It actually does so in kind of a douchey holier-than-thou way, but I'm so fed up with people being douchey about this the other way around that I'm fine with a little douchery in my favor. Anyway, he thinks stories need to be written "from the inside out"--that is, from act structure to scene structure to full treatment (essentially not!fic), with actual wording as the very last step. He says two-thirds of the time he spends writing a screenplay is spent on this part of the process, shuffling around index cards and summarizing scenes and such.

I'm working on a novel right now, and people keep asking me how much of it I've written. And the answer is: twenty-eight pages of outline, five pages of character notes, two pages of meta-planning, two pages of notes on style and voice, a page and a half of worldbuilding notes, two fanfic-style pieces working through character backstory, a physical bulletin board full of index cards color-coded on three levels... and one chapter of actual novel, in need of a major rewrite to fit the changes I've made to the outline. And I sure as hell don't feel like I've barely started to write. If I have a scene fully planned from start to end complete with overall tensions, emotional arcs, actions and reactions, that's not a scene I haven't written yet. It's a scene I'm in the middle of writing.

Not that wording isn't important. It is; it's one of the most important aspects of writing to me. I think that's why I need to do it like this--because this way I can rewrite everything else without getting stuck on the words. I'm still going to need to be able to edit and cut my words after I've written them, but (if done well) this strategy keeps that to a bare minimum.

There's another piece of writing advice I see a lot that goes: don't get stuck endlessly tinkering with your outline. At some point you just have to sit down and write. And that's true, if what you're doing actually is just endless tinkering. But if you're actually rewriting, and making important changes to improve the story, and getting more detailed as you go--that's not tinkering, that's writing from the inside out, and there is nothing wrong with it.

(I highly recommend that Robert McKee book, with the caveat that the guy is a douche. But if you can hold your nose through all the white straight male privilege, there's some awesome writing advice in there that applies to all forms of storytelling.)

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It's kind of weird to talk about origfic here. I guess I feel like it's okay to solicit support from my fandom community when it comes to writing fic, because y'all already know you'll be getting something out of it in the end, whereas with this stuff you're not already invested and there's no reason to expect you to pull out the pompoms. But, well, this is where my creative energies are flowing these days, and a couple of them did start out as fics, so. Here's what I'm working on.

- The steampunk one about hockey in the sky and underground--this was originally RPF, but I think it'll work much better this way. I'm very excited about playing with the worldbuilding for this.

- The sci-fi alien invader one, which never actually wanted to be bandom. That one was done and posted in one form as fic, but I always thought it had the potential to be better, so I'm doing a full rewrite.

- The one about sentient tattoos. I think it's a murder mystery, though I haven't solved it yet.

- The one about the kid who keeps falling off a playground and landing in a plane everyone expects her to be able to fly. This one will probably be finished first--it's been speaking to me lately.

- The one about the restlessness spirit and the girl who travels the earth ceaselessly because the spirit vanishes whenever she settles down, and she misses it. Haven't gotten much further than that premise; I suspect it will be more of an exercise in writing settings and mood than anything particularly plotty.

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I used to like a certain amount of confusion in my pleasure reading. I think particularly in my early teens, I was very committed to the idea that understanding things is not necessary to appreciate them. This probably stemmed in part from my emerging philosophical stance on natural phenomena--I was very active in a Unitarian Universalist church at the time. But mostly, I think, it was because I didn't understand most of the best writing I was consuming. I was discovering a lot of stuff like Terry Pratchett and Harlan Ellison and Dostoevsky, books for grown-ups that didn't always explain themselves to the extent that young adult books did. (I lived in the YA section of the library from about age 8 to 11.) I knew that I liked these books, I could tell that they were good, but I didn't always get everything they were saying. And that added to the experience for me, because the hints at the things I didn't understand certainly implied that they were worthwhile. When I did realize what they meant--Pratchett sometimes deals a few whacks with the clue-bat right at the end--they often blew my mind, but I also liked the sense of purposeful mystery when it never became clear what something meant. It didn't bother me that I couldn't figure it out, because I knew that a lot of literature leaves things open to interpretation on purpose. Feature, not a bug.

This perspective very much influenced my own writing. I think I somehow assumed that it was possible to create writing layered with deep meaning without fully understanding the meaning, because incomprehension was a major part of my conception of good writing. All my writing from that time of my life is very dramatic and mysterious and nonsensical.

Then I slid over to the other end of the spectrum when I got back into fandom around age nineteen. I was a little more self-conscious about knowing what I was doing at that point, so I stuck to a very straightforward writing style. After a while, I started focusing on things like mood and introspection, which are weaknesses in my writing and need a lot of attention and work for me to get them right, and also allow more room for figurative language and thoughtful observations. "B/L/I/N/D" was a turning point for me; it was the first time I tried to write something with layers of meaning that I actually understood.

I still enjoy open-ended stories in situations where there are multiple possible interpretations and I understand what those possibilities are. I also don't mind a writer artfully confusing me in the process of a story, as long as there's a point to it eventually. And some creators, like They Might Be Giants or the Welcome to Night Vale folks, elevate nonsense-spewing to an art form--the randomness itself is kind of the point, though you can read deeper meanings if you want to. But aside from that sort of thing, I'm not really into recreational bewilderment these days. Most of those great books I didn't understand when I was thirteen make more sense to me now, and the ones that don't generally turn out not to be so great after all.

And when I write, I know what I'm writing about. I usually have to think about the project for a while before I sort out that underlying meaning, and I don't always get it across successfully in the finished piece, but by the time I'm putting words into sentences, I know what I'm trying to make them do.

(The title of this post is a Jesse Hajicek quote referring to relationships, an area in which I followed a very similar trajectory of development. But that's a different post.)

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My muse lies to me about the difficulty of executing things well. Every time I have an idea for a piece--usually writing, for me--I always think it's going to be easy. Every time. It's right there in my head, all finished! All I need to do is translate it to the real world! And then I start doing that, and I realize it actually wasn't anywhere near finished in my head, and I have to fill in all the gaps. And rewrite the lines that don't work as well as I thought they would. And make sure all the necessary characterization and setting and backstory and stuff in my head makes it into the story.

And then I'm like: jeez, this isn't as good as I thought it was going to be. Because, you know, it's not the idealized version of itself I first conceptualized it as. It was going to be so fucking awesome, and now there's huge amounts of work to do before it gets anywhere near awesomeness, and is it worth it? I'm stubborn as shit and hate giving up, so my answer is usually yes, or if it's not V usually kicks my ass into putting in the effort anyway. And then I end up with something that's never quite the thing I wanted it to be. Sometimes I like it anyway. Usually somebody else likes it, and that's enough to make it worth having done. But god, that middle part is a bitch.

(This post brought to you by the grueling but surprisingly productive process of forcing myself to go through the musical and justify in whole sentences the presence of each song both on individual merits and in terms of usefulness to the story as a whole.)

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I see lists of writing advice a lot, and I usually click on them, because once in a while something in there really speaks to me. That doesn't happen often, though. Usually it's the same few ideas expressed in slightly different words. The good ones start off with a disclaimer about how everyone writes their own way, and the same advice won't always work for everyone. I have to be careful to keep that in mind or I sometimes start feeling like I'm not doing it right, because there's one piece of writing advice on almost every list that doesn't apply to me: the Nike advice.

Just write. Even if you don't feel like writing, sit down and wring some words out. Don't worry if they suck. Just make it happen. Once you start writing, it's always easier to keep writing. This one shows up all over the place, and it's just not how I work. If I write when I don't feel like writing, I end up frustrated, angry, and usually unable to return to the piece for a long time. When I reread my own fics, I can tell if a part was written because I just wanted it to be written, as opposed to actually wanting to write it. I still can't read the threesome scene in "Testosterone Girls & Harlequin Boys" because I hated writing it so much that I just wanted it to be over, and when it was, I was done with it for good. My best fics are the ones that are written entirely in the zone, either in one session or over the course of several. And sometimes that takes a long time, because my writing moods don't just hit every day or two; but I can tell it makes a difference in the quality, and if I really care about the story and want it to be the best it can be, I know I have to be patient.

But when I do feel like writing, I feel like nothing but writing. When there's a story in my head that wants to exist, and I'm in the right headspace to let it out, it feels so fucking good. I don't believe in life having an overarching purpose, but I do believe in the power of having and achieving goals. When I'm writing, just for a little while (sometimes a long while if I'm lucky enough to have uninterrupted time to myself), I have a purpose. It doesn't really matter if it's porny fic about bros helping each other out, or serious fic about socioeconomic privilege, or crackfic about Edward Cullen banging the bassist from My Chemical Romance. For that time, I know what I'm working toward.

It's the same with other forms of creation, although those don't strike me as often as the writing bug. But with anything creative, anything that involves working toward the production of a result, that same feeling can come over me. It's great. I love it. I love feeling like I've accomplished something, and I love feeling like I'm in the process of accomplishing something. I love predicting that I can do a thing and then doing it and proving myself right. And of course I like getting positive feedback validating that same prediction, that I could do it--but if that were all, I wouldn't be writing Killjoys gen and They Might Be Giants crossover fic. It's about that zone--the feeling of being in it, the feeling of coming out of it with something to show for it, even not being in it but knowing that I will be again. That's what I get out of writing.

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I think I just figured out why the "more more more!" comments bother me so much. Obviously it's rude to be so demanding, but the intent behind those comments is always a compliment, and I kind of feel like I should be able to look past the entitlement and be pleased that they like my work. But without fail, those comments irritate the shit out of me, and I think I've peeled that reaction down to its root.

I'm a concise writer. I've never cracked 20k words in one fic. I almost always err on the side of leaving out details, and my beta comments always have a lot more notes along the lines of "explain this more?" than "this part is extraneous." I see that as a strength in some ways, but it does mean that completeness is an area of my writing I tend to worry about. I'm never quite sure I've written enough to convey everything a particular piece needs.

So when people comment "Write more of this!", I perceive that on an emotional level as negative feedback for this aspect of my writing. But I understand on an intellectual level that it's not (at least not usually) intended as criticism, so I can't react to it like I would to actual concrit. Maybe being aware of that will help me be more graceful about that kind of comment.

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Today I got a comment on my Teen Wolf/hockey crossover fic that... just... look:

...this story, I have to say, precisely illuminated Erica's character for me in a way I've never gotten before from a story or the show. I started to cry when she explained her changed relationship to her body to Patrick. Sorry if this is reader TMI, but I've had variously debilitating chronic pain for most of my life and it made my body like just a shitty apartment I rented, untrustable and sometimes unsafe. But now I am an athlete (long story) and getting stronger has led to less pain and also relating to my body for the first time as a partner I could trust and do things with. Anyway, it's not often I get to hear someone else telling that story, even if it's about being a werewolf. So thank you.

This isn't why I wrote that story. I didn't even start out knowing that aspect of the story would exist; it was supposed to be crack, and when it stopped being crack, I made endless fun of myself for turning such a cracky premise into Srs Bzns. This... no words.

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Aaaaand having just written a post about how pack feels are not my thing, I seem to have incorporated them as a plot point in my latest fic. *hands* I should probably learn to not make sweeping statements like that. It just begs the universe to make me contradict myself.

In highly related news: the hockey/TW crossover fic has blasted past the 10k mark, and is on track to end up at 15-18k. If this fic (wherein I slash Patrick Kane and Derek Hale in all seriousness) turns out to beat out "sing it for the n00bs" as my longest fic to date, I will laugh and laugh and possibly cry. But hey, I wrote over six thousand words today, if you count 2:20am as still being today. That is a lot of words for one day, at least for me. It's good to have my muse back. Even if it's forcing me to pour all my srsbzns Kaner characterization into a fic no one will ever read because it is not even a rare pairing, it is a nonexistent pairing, and also a pairing that should be crack that I am not writing as crack. Still. I'm writing, and that's more than I've been able to say in a while, and it feels really good.

(I guess the actual breaking of the writer's-block barrier was the TW fic I posted last week, which also kind of made me sob-laugh by earning meeeelyuns of hits and some very sweet comments indicating that, like, one reader who was not actively following my Twitter feed where I was talking about it actually picked up on what it was intended to be about. No one ~~understands~~ my ~~artistry~~ D: subversion is hard.)

I'm not doing NaNoWriMo, by the way. Because I don't have time to write this month, you see. *eyeroll at self*

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I just watched yet another movie that would have been way better if they hadn't tried to shoehorn a romance subplot into the story they were actually trying to tell, and it struck me that there's a little bit of a double standard when it comes to people judging fic for being all about the pairings. Sure, we put in actual sex scenes where more traditional stories fade to black, but that's mostly because we don't have an MPAA or an FCC telling us we can't. We're no worse about sticking in googly eyes where they don't belong than any other kind of writer. Even kids' movies do it--I'm still bitter about Pixar fucking up WALL-E by trying to turn it into some kind of Mac/PC robot love story. (It probably has something to do with filmmakers wanting to add female characters but not having any idea what to do with them besides making them love interests, but that's a different rant.)

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