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Go Team Me
I'd just like to record that I've written an amazing-to-me 71 pages in January... most of it original fic, too. There have been whole years where I haven't written 71 pages. I'm not sure why I'm being consistently inspired this month, especially after the last two months of 2002 were a bit of a disappointment page count-wise, and it's been a fair amount of time since I was inspired, but there you have it.
This is not to say that the fiction written is necessarily good, but at least it is written, which is pretty much the first step you have to take when writing. I dislike reworking fiction -- not so much editing, which is revising the words, but rewriting a scene that has been committed to paper/electrons feels like writing an AU to my own conception of the way a scene went down -- it's wrong.
Sometimes it's because I didn't know what was going to happen in a story until it happens, though sometimes I've planned out the scenes and action and dialogue very carefully, so that if I get it "wrong" the first time, I can't go back and make "things" happen in the wrong order -- it would be like going back in a Real Life (tm) conversation and erasing the memory of what was said and substitute it with the way things could have been done better. I don't like to replay events in my own head that way, and once I've committed a character to a dramatic action or statement, I'm really loathe to take it back.
And geez, I hate having to cut paragraphs wholesale. I realized, as I was going over what I'd written yesterday as I was gearing up to write tonight, I'd written an entirely unnecessary second introduction of a character who was already in the scene, I'd just lost track of who was there. (It's a five-sided conversation/argument, and she'd had the bad taste to hold her tongue for a couple of pages. You write a page here, two pages there, and see if you can keep track of all your characters....)
So I had to cut, like, three paragraphs. < whimper >
Now, if they had been paragraphs that had repeated something said two pages before, it wouldn't have been so traumatic, that's part of prose revision, and that I have much less problem with. Give me hard copy, and a big red pen, and I'll resequence whole paragraphs, cut "said" tags, remove all the girly words from my male characters' mouths... but just cutting action? That's another thing entirely -- even if it was action that by definition couldn't have happened, since as I said, this character had already been introduced.
I think I may be a little bit obsessive about this stuff....
This is not to say that the fiction written is necessarily good, but at least it is written, which is pretty much the first step you have to take when writing. I dislike reworking fiction -- not so much editing, which is revising the words, but rewriting a scene that has been committed to paper/electrons feels like writing an AU to my own conception of the way a scene went down -- it's wrong.
Sometimes it's because I didn't know what was going to happen in a story until it happens, though sometimes I've planned out the scenes and action and dialogue very carefully, so that if I get it "wrong" the first time, I can't go back and make "things" happen in the wrong order -- it would be like going back in a Real Life (tm) conversation and erasing the memory of what was said and substitute it with the way things could have been done better. I don't like to replay events in my own head that way, and once I've committed a character to a dramatic action or statement, I'm really loathe to take it back.
And geez, I hate having to cut paragraphs wholesale. I realized, as I was going over what I'd written yesterday as I was gearing up to write tonight, I'd written an entirely unnecessary second introduction of a character who was already in the scene, I'd just lost track of who was there. (It's a five-sided conversation/argument, and she'd had the bad taste to hold her tongue for a couple of pages. You write a page here, two pages there, and see if you can keep track of all your characters....)
So I had to cut, like, three paragraphs. < whimper >
Now, if they had been paragraphs that had repeated something said two pages before, it wouldn't have been so traumatic, that's part of prose revision, and that I have much less problem with. Give me hard copy, and a big red pen, and I'll resequence whole paragraphs, cut "said" tags, remove all the girly words from my male characters' mouths... but just cutting action? That's another thing entirely -- even if it was action that by definition couldn't have happened, since as I said, this character had already been introduced.
I think I may be a little bit obsessive about this stuff....
no subject
This is not to say that the fiction written is necessarily good, but at least it is written, which is pretty much the first step you have to take when writing.
Yeah, that's the part I always have trouble with.