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Jul. 12th, 2004 12:04 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
msagaraSomething ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sartorias is discussing made me think of something vis a vis writing and process. I started to post this in response to her comment about narrator and voice, and then realized that it was a digression, and off topic. So I'm posting it here.
I find process discussions fascinating precisely because no two writers I've ever met have the same process, although there's overlap.
Susan Musgrave once came to one of my University classes as a guest lecturer. She spoke, of course, about her own writing processes, and her own approach to poetry, and (this is paraphrased, because I don't have eidetic memory) she said if the -initial- attempt to write something didn't work with a minimal amount of editing, she threw it away. All of the power, in her opinion and at that time was in the initial rush to paper, and losing that in heavy revision killed the poem, for her.
I often find that that's how I approach novels/novel chapters or sections. I've thrown away as much as 600 pages before, to start over, rather than revise heavily, once I've realized what the issues are. It's not that I think all 600 pages are -- or were -- garbage; it's just that the revisions would have been so surgical it would have been more an act of vivisection than an act of organic creation.
Okay, that sounded pretentious. I'll stop now.
Well, almost. I started to wonder, in the discussion about voice, whether or not dissection & understanding of a particular style can be subsumed into one's own process and made part of it -- especially for people who tend to write with a more heavy reliance on the sub-conscious than is probably wise (I include myself in that number).
I know it helps when I review; I know it helps when I critique. I know that I can do this with my work much after the fact, when I've forgotten the initial, blind impulse and emotionality that drove the writing in the first place. But I also know that I live in a jungle, and writing is like hacking a path through dense growth with a machete (I borrowed this analogy fromaireon, who used it to describe the writing of one of my favourite of her books <wry g>.)
sartorias is discussing made me think of something vis a vis writing and process. I started to post this in response to her comment about narrator and voice, and then realized that it was a digression, and off topic. So I'm posting it here.I find process discussions fascinating precisely because no two writers I've ever met have the same process, although there's overlap.
Susan Musgrave once came to one of my University classes as a guest lecturer. She spoke, of course, about her own writing processes, and her own approach to poetry, and (this is paraphrased, because I don't have eidetic memory) she said if the -initial- attempt to write something didn't work with a minimal amount of editing, she threw it away. All of the power, in her opinion and at that time was in the initial rush to paper, and losing that in heavy revision killed the poem, for her.
I often find that that's how I approach novels/novel chapters or sections. I've thrown away as much as 600 pages before, to start over, rather than revise heavily, once I've realized what the issues are. It's not that I think all 600 pages are -- or were -- garbage; it's just that the revisions would have been so surgical it would have been more an act of vivisection than an act of organic creation.
Okay, that sounded pretentious. I'll stop now.
Well, almost. I started to wonder, in the discussion about voice, whether or not dissection & understanding of a particular style can be subsumed into one's own process and made part of it -- especially for people who tend to write with a more heavy reliance on the sub-conscious than is probably wise (I include myself in that number).
I know it helps when I review; I know it helps when I critique. I know that I can do this with my work much after the fact, when I've forgotten the initial, blind impulse and emotionality that drove the writing in the first place. But I also know that I live in a jungle, and writing is like hacking a path through dense growth with a machete (I borrowed this analogy from
aireon, who used it to describe the writing of one of my favourite of her books <wry g>.)
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Re: Parallels...
Date: 2004-07-14 08:23 pm (UTC)Not being a hypocrite, the -last- thing I am every going to criticize someone for is the length of their posts <wry g>. And I find the reply interesting because if you cut certain words, it could just as easily be a discussion about your writing process; it's all creative.
When I was talking with one of my cover artists on the phone, she said that she works out the details in the colour sketches, and also works out the flaws, sometimes changing the picture as she goes -- the painters version of first draft, in which something that seemed like a great idea in conception just doesn't work with the -words-. Well, not words in her case <g>.
But I also remember, during our first conversation, that the artist said she was never going to be try to do a photo-realistic type of painting because to her it didn't look like a painting; it looked like a photo.
As for invisible methods of creation ... :/. One of the things that I often hear complaints about -is- my prose, or the difficulty of getting around my prose to the story beneath it.
I think my favourite usenet post, way back (which someone kindly emailed me, because I would have missed it otherwise) was written by someone who almost -loathed- my word-for-word style. Why was it my favourite? Because he'd clearly read every word I'd written to that point, and I think more than once, and while he jumped up and down about the style, he said that the characters were interesting enough -- barely -- that he could keep going. He was, I think, the only poster in that thread who -had- read everything. So it tickled my funny bone.
I kind of like words. If I have to work at them, if I'm aware of them, I still like them -- it changes the texture of the story for me, that's all. I do understand that in the interest of accessibility, the less visible the prose, the better.
But I don't write convoluted sentences on purpose, and even in editing, they seem perfectly natural -to me- <rueful g>.
Parallels...
Date: 2004-07-15 09:54 pm (UTC)And I really didn't mean to say by talking about making the style or method invisible that I meant doing photorealism; that's yet another style in itself, and is frequently quite intrusive on its own. I didn't express myself very well there, perhaps. What I meant more to say was that there are any number of unique styles of both writing and art; ideally everyone finds their own unique style or voice. But I wish for myself, is to find the best way to express that style so that it is inseparable, seamless with the intent of the story or image; so the two aspects are melded so flawlessly that you couldn't imagine the story being told in quite that way or painted the same way by anyone else. Or even having the story or image possibly told by anyone else; the overall result stands as such a unified creation that concept and execution are inseparable. Of course different people would tell the same basic story in different ways or paint the same subject in different ways and that's all good.
I guess I just want a story or image presented in a gutsy genuine way, from the heart, rather than filtered through some trendy facade as I have seen so many artists do. This is not to say _I'm_ any great shakes, mind you, just expressing my own craving for better quality out of myself, which is a very different thing from the more painful realities I face in my own efforts. :/
And I also didn't meant to imply that you yourself write convoluted or confusing prose; I don't find that true at all. (This from me, who started crying on... what was it? page 5 or 11? of The Broken Crown. Had to put the book down because I was in a restaurant and was getting all emotional). Good god, I said to myself, this is definitiely a woman writer, she has kids and she writes from the gut. I LIKE that, and it seems to be darned hard to find. :)