Writing filter

[the_rck]

I'm hoping to spend time this evening polishing the remix fic. I feel rather unmotivated to do that. Not even reminding myself that it will go up in public helps. I know it's competent writing now. A good polish would improve that. I just keep looking at it (and at other things I've written) and feeling that I have no idea where to start.

I'm bad at rewrites on some levels. In college, I never did more than one draft of a paper unless we were required to hand in multiple drafts. Some of that was because I had to use a typewriter. The barrier to editing when one has to retype the entire paper is huge. Some of it, though, was that I usually had no idea what needed changing.

This is also why I'm crap at beta reading for other people. If the prose is competent but not spectacular, I don't have suggestions beyond typo checking. I can take a piece like that and rewrite it so that it's stylistically better. I did that on a few occasions for a friend in college. ("I think you're trying to say x, y and z. Are you? If so, say it like this.") That's a different skill, one that overwrites the original author's own style, and I see it as hugely undesirable in fiction.

I think that, when I do a polish or a rewrite or whatever, there are two ways I can make it work. The first is with a lot of help from a beta reader (or readers) who have sprinkled lots of comments throughout the piece. Those comments can be notes about how a paragraph does or doesn't work, notes on grammatical errors, notes on characterization, notes on the reader's responses right then. It doesn't matter as long as there are a lot of them.

The second way I can rewrite is to print the piece out and retype it in an empty document. That forces me to look at every word and to decide whether or not it's the one I really want. It works less well than using comments if I have enough comments. It's also a grim and tedious process that tends to make me loathe what I'm writing.

I suspect that some of the problems I have with the second method come from feeling that nobody cares about what I'm writing. I stop caring early in the retyping process. I think it's related to the fact that I do better on first drafts when I have a cheerleader or am doing word wars. I don't actually have to think that somebody likes the story. I just need to think that somebody cares and that somebody exists beyond me and the story and my beloved distractions, Scott and Cordelia.

Feedback after I post a fic doesn't help this problem much. Partly because I've never gotten a vast amount (I get a respectable amount when I remember to publicize things), and partly because it comes after the work is done. I'm not motivated to write better by the expectation that future readers will like the story, but I can be motivated by the idea that someone who's seen it already might like it better if I put in more work.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

susanwrites was talking about this a while back. I wish I had an answer--the older I get the more I realize that no one gives a spit but me. When I was younger, my intense drive was all that mattered.