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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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Date: 2004-07-14 08:25 pm (UTC)This happens for me, as well. But I'm not sure that I write tight in the same way you do -- yours is a more elegant, compact prose. I've never been asked to -cut-, though.
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Date: 2004-07-15 10:51 am (UTC)Or, to put it another way, when it comes to the large majority of readers, do the words get in the way? Is a writer better off with less craft, more story, and more transparency in the style?
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Date: 2004-07-15 12:55 pm (UTC)If we define better off as selling, then for the most part -- at least from observations in genre, and recently -- one is better off. Writers, and people who would be writers, are the readers who most often care.
I have mixed feelings about this, because I have a bit of the word fetishist in me. Also, as a reader, I seldom find -anyone's- prose to be so difficult that I have trouble parsing story. I can point to a piece of writing and say "you will lose people with this", but it doesn't lose me, and from a purely selfish standpoint, I don't necessarily encourage people to change their style.
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Date: 2004-07-15 08:25 pm (UTC)