Do Not Read Until March 28th >:-/

...is what I wrote on a purple post-it two weeks ago. A post-it which I then placed over the title of a  new story I had just finished. This is part of a writing regimen I'm trying to create for myself in which, instead of attacking a new work with my red pen as soon as it is done, I force myself to put it away for a while and return to the story with fresh eyes.

I'd almost made it too--but succumbed to my urges four days ahead of schedule. The first time I forced myself to do this it worked just fine. The larger project I'm currently editing/re-writing/hiding from, because the writing sometimes makes me embarrassed for myself, waited six weeks to be looked at again. But this tiny one just could not wait. It called to me, and I ignored the "serious face" I'd drawn on the post-it, deftly ripping it off so I did not have to see it glower at me for trespassing. 

I'm an impatient person in general, but part of me felt guilty for breaking a rule concerning my own writing that I'm trying to establish. 

Do you revise a work as soon as it's completed or do you ignore the urge to revise right away? And if you do, how long do you usually give yourself before you go back to it? 

Short Story Rant

So I now believe it was a mistake reading Neil Gaiman's Snow, Glass, Apples last night at around 11:30. Not because I was too scared to go to sleep but because never--NEVER have I felt like such a monster for liking a story this much! I was still grinning like an idiot lunatic (because only lunatics and writers gain happiness from some of the events in that story) an hour later when I climbed into bed.

There is nothing more I want right now than to go back in time and kidnap Stephanie Meyer before she wrote he r books, tie to a chair and read this story to her (maybe smack her once or twice with a xeroxed version) so she learns what a vampire is supposed to be. Beautiful--yes. Glittery? NO!

I had to resist to read this story over again as soon as I'd finished it and to count how many times he uses the words glass, snow and apples in that veritable fairy tale masterpiece!!!

Editing

...it seems I'll be repetitive in my posts early on, but editing is an important part of my life right now--a turning point really. To recap: I've never really edited my own work before, mainly because I hadn't written anything which I considered worth the time and effort to edit.

While clicking around on twitter recently I saw an article that discussed getting over "the editing blues." I remember some of what the article said but I was surprised, and a little disappointed, to find that most of the advice there was based on procrastination, on doing things in between editing to make yourself feel better about it.

Start a new project, was one of the main points. But what if your life has become one in which you have a few projects floating around, waiting to be edited!? What then? Just keep writing in hopes that you'll get tired of that and then want to edit? I know, I know--I'm being facetious. But I'm starting to understand those people that ask: doesn't analyzing what you read ruin the story? Isn't it more difficult to look past the writing and get lost in it?

Well, yes! It is! Especially when it's your own story, because writing is even more enjoyable than reading in that you literally (ha-ha) get lost in the story, it takes you with it as it goes on. But going back to it....eek! That's how I feel about my own 'pride and joy' right now. But I guess that's a good thing--because I can tell my writing has improved dramatically within one project, which is, hey--great! But it just makes it that much more difficult to get through it without getting bogged down with each and every sentence.

Anyone, out there, have a magical cure for the editing blues that is, well, efficient?

Wastefulness

This'll be off-topic, but short. I just need to share my views on wastefulness. It's everywhere and it usually arises in situations where the person means well. 

I was out to dinner with a friend tonight and ordered an iced-tea. Now, I know she meant well, and I am not against free re-fills, the waitress came and took my glass even before I was half way done with it and replaced it with a new one. She poured the other one out and threw out the straw. She also did the same with my friend's drink. And it's not like I got very far in the new glass either, one glass would have suited me fine.

I know it's silly to get worked up over something this small, but I can't help feeling that this is a negative trend and that I see it becoming the norm, even in a world where there are voices against this type of behavior. Or maybe it's always been this way and I'm just finding it harder to ignore....

On Reading

So it seems to me it is fashionable to discuss what one is reading nowadays. And being an avid reader, I think I too will share. Because sharing is caring; and I care about reading.

First off, I would like to express my distaste and then my slight distaste for two books, then I'll move on to the good ones.

Boris Godunov, by Pushkin was promised to be a masterpiece...and many other wonderful things. Well I found that it is not. It could be because of the translator, because, being bilingual myself, I understand how something can be utterly delicious in one language and well, not, in another. Overall I found it boring, confusing, and not really worth my time.

The book I feel slight distaste for is Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. Now, [side note] I have always been "bad" at not liking books, it seems that my innate pleasure of reading tends to color anything I read, regardless of how bad it is. This is not one of those books. I usually love descriptive writing, and the content of this book is right up my alley: Robin Hood, knights and many other great things, but as much as I love the original stories and legends this book really needed an editor! A bit like my blog, this book tends to go on tangents and not get to the actual story fast enough, furthermore, it brushes over the good characters and focuses on, in my opinion anyway, the boring characters.

Now the rest of the books are great and they are from the two classes that I enjoy the most this semester, the first one being a Russian Lit class, called Dostoevsky and the West, which tends to be more philosophical than anything else--which is why I'm taking the class in the first place. And the second is an independent study with my aforementioned "Mentor" (who doesn't know they get called that), where we discuss writing within the Fantasy genre.

Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud: This book inspired a short story, and what will hopefully be a novel-length work, two things that I'm presently working on, or trying to when I get the time, anyway.
The Rebel by Albert Camus.
Notes From the Underground by Dostoevsky.
No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre: This is a one act play of psychological warfare and overall amazingness....hint: it's set in hell.

From the second class we have:
On Writing by Stephen King. One of the reasons I'm looking forward to graduating is to have time to re-read this book, even though I just finished it less than three weeks ago.
The Secret History of Fantasy by Peter S. Beagle. If you like short stories, and you like Fantasy, read this. Now.

So. Ahem-ahem. I know no one really reads this (yet?), but if on the off-chance someone stumbles upon this and wants to comment on this list, or maybe provide one of their own--that'd be, well, awesome!

Rambling No. 2

So I am definitely addicted to blogging now, in just three days my life adopted this activity as if it'd always been there. I blame my mentor. My mentor is an amazing person who has made the unwitting mistake of offering to help me improve my slim chances of becoming a good writer. And so far we have spent our few meetings discussing all things writing, and has ignited an even stronger passion for these discussions than I had before, which has led me here. To this blog and now to this post. And so I have decided to exercise my need to talk about my writing and all pertaining to it into the abyss that is my readership. Enjoy, internet void!

Rambling No.1

First of all--it seems I'm already becoming addicted to this blogging business, and considering I have an addictive personality I'm not too surprised, though I am a bit concerned. I'm writing this one now, because I realize how negative...and well, whiny my first post sounded and feel the need to counteract that, and also explain myself.

It was really just one of those days...and I should not have written my first blog post yesterday. But the reason I felt it was necessary to discuss my grappling with editing the first draft of my manuscript is that it is so different from writing it, or writing anything. In the short period that I have been actively writing it has proven to be the highlight of any day, and I intended to treat editing the same way: put an hour or two aside every day to get some done. But editing is not nearly as fulfilling. With writing I'm creating, I'm telling myself a story. With editing I'm deconstructing the inner workings of my own story...which, if it were anyone else's I'd be having a blast, but as it is mine, it's mainly proving to be more work.

And like I said at the beginning of my first post, I had no expectations of it not being work, I just assumed it hide the hard part and seem more like fun, like writing does.

Regardless, I'm grateful to have something to be editing, and to those few, yet amazing, people who are helping me along the way.

On Editing

I knew self-editing would be hard. Don’t get me wrong—I work my ass off when I edit other people’s work, and I expected to have to work even harder on my own, considering I have the final say on everything.

I’ve never truly self-edited before. I didn’t really know how; the editing was always done on a sentence level, not the whole “does each sentence contribute to the rest of the story?” type of editing. Where you have to question each phrase and see if it contributes, if it does its job, or if it’s just tagging along for the ride. Because that’s what first drafts seem to be filled with: free loaders, just there to weigh the ride down and make it harder and longer to get to the end.

But sadly, the free loaders aren’t the problem, not even the half-good sentences that need to be polished, the real problem arises when the sentence is perfect. I use the word loosely here, and don’t really believe that anything I write is perfect. But I’m referring to a sentence that does its dual job, of being a sentence and carrying the rest of the story along, but you still spend more time looking at it and trying to make it better than you spend on the bad sentences. These moments are the perfect pause in the work for doubt to manifest itself.

It’s these instances when I wonder if I’m too tired to be working right then, if I’m going too easy on myself, if I still don’t know what I’m doing, if the rest of my 98,000 words are even worth it. This is when I put down the pen and pull out the highlighter and highlight the sentence, telling myself to go back to it or get a second opinion on it. But this happens more and more often now, and again I don’t know if it’s because I’m losing the momentum I started out with or if I had gained the momentum when I was writing these down, and the highlighted paragraphs are not, in fact, proof that I don’t know what I’m doing, but that I do.

What I need is a recording of the words “it’s fine, keep it.” So I can hit a button every time I get to one of these moments of doubt and just follow that advice and leave it. I will, in time come back to it, and when I do all that I’ll have accomplished is making the doubt return as I return to the highlighted sections. So the highlighter will be used more sparingly, if at all.

These positive thought work great in theory, and though I tell myself “it’s fine, keep it,” the doubt is still there, because I’m telling myself that it’s good, which, in my twisted mind, probably means it’s not.

I know the first sections of the story aren’t as good because I spent too much time obsessing over the language, and stretching every scene out just out of a fascination with watching the word count go up and up. 

So I know it’ll get easier as the story progresses, I just wish I could leave the good sentences be and spend more energy on the ones that need improving, and even more on the ones that need kicking out.