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“First things first, to the death.”
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“No. To the pain.”
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“I don’t think I’m quite familiar with that phrase.”
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-The Princess Bride
I’m in the midst of “End of Book Pain” right now. Because of sekrit things, I absolutely must finish the first draft of the WIP by as close to the end of the month as possible. I wish I had a method of talking to my younger self so I could tell her to always “write to the end” (also that the phrase “When in Rome” should not be applied to situations involving punk musicians and malt liquor).
I wrote a lot, but I did not finish very many things. I wrote and rewrote the beginnings of a great many things. I can write beginnings LIKE A BOSS. However, I never got around to practicing middles and ends to the same degree. I’ve been playing catchup with those for awhile now and sometimes I have a bit of a teenage-style pout about them being “TOO HARD”. They aren’t, I just haven’t had the same kind of practice at them.
See, at about the 1/2 or 2/3rd point in a long work it becomes horribly obvious where I made terrible mistakes. These errors start to haunt my thoughts and make it very difficult to move forward. They groan, bleeding on the word battlefield behind me. I want to stop and tend to their injuries, but I must grit my teeth, reload, and push forward. There will be time to tend to my wounded once the battle is over. Finishing can be hell, but I’ll do a better job of triaging my mistakes once the bullets stop flying. If I stop, I might save one but lose the battle and forfeit the field.
Thou shalt not edit in the writing trenches. I can’t fix words I don’t write. Write to the end, regroup, triage based on the whole, then edit.
Month: October 2011
Advancement Through Weakness
“If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.”― Fay Weldon
I learned to sculpt making kiln-fired ceramics. After I no longer had access to a kiln I switched to using sculpey clay and was constantly frustrated by what I saw as the limitations of sculpey. Some time passed and I happened upon instructions for a project that called for making an armature out of tin foil and then covering it in sculpey. I knew what an armature was, but I thought of it as being something you only used on very large sculptures. Discovering that simple tin foil could not only help me do what I wanted to, but could help me create things I hadn’t previously thought possible blew my mind. It opened up a whole new world of things I could create. It turned what I had seen as a limitation into a strength and opened up possibilities that weren’t possible with traditional clay techniques.
Recently I had to provide a full outline for a story and I discovered… I didn’t know how to construct a plot from the ground up without actually writing the whole story. Holy crap. Plot is the bones the story hangs on– and I don’t really think about it? Clearly I can’t be HORRIBLE at plot as my stories aren’t falling over due to lack of support– but how much better could they be?
It’s hard work doing plot autopsies of books and movies I enjoy. It’s even harder constructing my own outlines. I’d much rather rely on my strengths. Whenever I decide that learning to plot is too difficult my internal editor turns into my editor friend Lily standing over my prone form, her pink hair flying as she punctuates each word with a ruler smack, “You. Will. Learn. To. Plot.”
Yes’m.
MINERVA ZIMMERMAN 