I need to find a better way to do my writing. This rewriting and rewriting and rewriting is draining and yet necessary for me to get to where I'm ready to release the story into the wild, because every time I go through what I've written, I find ways to make it clearer and better and more accessible and that's ridiculous. But if I don't do this, I know what I'll turn out is not as good as it can be and will be more open to criticism over nothings...like the guy who bitched about LD because I had a character misuse the conjugation of to lay and gave it a one-star review on Amazon.
I halfway blame having a computer for this. I can write out a story and then rewriting it is easy, relatively speaking. I don't have to retype every draft, can make changes with minimal effort and when I do print out a copy to make corrections, it's not like I spent hours doing the typing myself. I wonder if that's made me lazy in the setting up of the story's arc and the characters?
When I wrote Find Ray T, I did it as an experiment of sorts. I worked up a basic outline and the character basics then took a week off work, bought a case of Corona, began drinking and wrote the script in 8 days. And the story has stayed basically the same, ever since. Details have changed...but thinking about it they changed a lot as I got deeper and deeper into the story and listened to feedback and tried to make it funnier and more action-packed and something people could connect with...so maybe this is just the way I have to write -- over and over and over till I finally just say stop.
Damn, that makes it a shitload of work, with me having the vaguest notion of where the story is going and then plunging in and writing. Though to be honest, I'm at the point where I'm happy with how things turn out. I'd say I tossed half of what I wrote for The Vanishing of Owen Taylor and didn't come up with the idea of who the killer was till months into working on it...and then I didn't figure out how to do the reveal in an interesting way for months more. But now? I'm so fucking happy with the final product, I wouldn't change a bit of it.
Okay...so I'm probably whining over something I have no real intention of changing. Which isn't unusual for me. I bitch and moan and dance around then keep doing things the way I'm bitching and moaning about. I don't know if that's smart or crazy or just a lazy form of chaos. Maybe I see myself as God and I'm forming a world out of the nothingness in my brain.
Hmm...does that notion count as sacrilege?
I halfway blame having a computer for this. I can write out a story and then rewriting it is easy, relatively speaking. I don't have to retype every draft, can make changes with minimal effort and when I do print out a copy to make corrections, it's not like I spent hours doing the typing myself. I wonder if that's made me lazy in the setting up of the story's arc and the characters?
When I wrote Find Ray T, I did it as an experiment of sorts. I worked up a basic outline and the character basics then took a week off work, bought a case of Corona, began drinking and wrote the script in 8 days. And the story has stayed basically the same, ever since. Details have changed...but thinking about it they changed a lot as I got deeper and deeper into the story and listened to feedback and tried to make it funnier and more action-packed and something people could connect with...so maybe this is just the way I have to write -- over and over and over till I finally just say stop.
Damn, that makes it a shitload of work, with me having the vaguest notion of where the story is going and then plunging in and writing. Though to be honest, I'm at the point where I'm happy with how things turn out. I'd say I tossed half of what I wrote for The Vanishing of Owen Taylor and didn't come up with the idea of who the killer was till months into working on it...and then I didn't figure out how to do the reveal in an interesting way for months more. But now? I'm so fucking happy with the final product, I wouldn't change a bit of it.
Okay...so I'm probably whining over something I have no real intention of changing. Which isn't unusual for me. I bitch and moan and dance around then keep doing things the way I'm bitching and moaning about. I don't know if that's smart or crazy or just a lazy form of chaos. Maybe I see myself as God and I'm forming a world out of the nothingness in my brain.
Hmm...does that notion count as sacrilege?
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