It's a Process and Other Douchebag Phrases

At some point you wonder if what you're doing makes sense. Makes sense in the sense that will people read this? Will people enjoy this? Sometimes the question is much simpler. It's not about other people reading it or liking it, but am I wasting my time? Can I do this? I mean, obviously just about any literate person with enough tenacity can write 50,000 words a month, so this is not the question I'm asking. Rather, do I have enough skill and talent to pull this off? Because the end of the month will come and hopefully I'll have something grand to show for it (and by grand I mean hefty word count, and by word count I mean more than just "I don't know what to write" over and over again).

For Nanowrimo I'd decided to revisit a manuscript I began two years ago in my Creative Writing class under the guidance of a teacher who provided the encouragement and space for me to simply begin. Because though I know it sounds a bit ridiculous, but in order to write fiction, I needed to nurtured as a person and writer. My more recent growth as a creator began with this teacher, and because I trusted her, I followed a path on which I learned to accept writing as a process. It's such a douchebag-sounding phrase, right? But it's easy to dismiss the idea that the first draft isn't going to be publishable and instead demand from oneself that it be perfect. It's had to stop editing yourself on the sentence level, and that's terrible when you haven't even hit the paragraph mark. Creating anything becomes an exercise in futility when you're constantly second-guessing yourself and hitting that delete key.

So, anyway, this work in progress. It's interesting because I haven't read it in years so even though I know wrote it, I don't know what's going to happen! It's kind of amazing. Fortunately, I wrote notes to myself so that I remember where it was going to go. During my last semester of school, we had a few conversations about how you need to let a WIP sit for a day or two before going back to edit otherwise you're just still writing. What is editing? That's another conversation. Well, this story's been sitting unattended for two years, and it sometimes seems like another person wrote it. I see some parts are terrible and so obviously need work. I can't believe this was the final version that I turned in! But that's what I'm saying about this process.

On the other hand, I've been reading Raymond Feist's Riftwar Saga. Apparently, he'd gone back to these already successful books to edit them, resulting in "The Author's Preferred Version." I'm unfamiliar with the unpreferred version, but I have a feeling I'd maybe like those better. These newer editions feel over polished-- maybe something like how I've heard people criticize some music as being over-produced. Feist's writing is so immaculate that I feel led to places and conclusions, and I'm ever aware that I'm in a fictional setting. Think about old Tim Burton films like Beetlejuice or Edward Scissorhands or Pee Wee's Big Adventure and compare to the Alice in Wonderland movies or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Not saying one is better than any other, but you can see a difference.

I've given myself permission to use blogging about writing as part of my Nanowrimo word count. This helps me focus. It's like warming up before a race or perhaps revving the engine on a cold, cold morning. It also reminds me that writing is just writing. It's just words strung together and sentences strung together and then paragraphs. And by the end of the blog, I can feel like a writer again. Like a creator. Like I can do this whether or not you like it because I'm simply sending these words out into the void, just like my stories.