Quote:
Originally Posted by arjaybe
Thank goodness for those things that are effable, or we'd all be gibbering madmen going around and around an idea without ever being able to get it down just right.
|
Hmm... I'm not sure how to take that - especially since there are some days when becoming a gibbering madman seems likely ... and browsing through my writing journal makes me wonder if it has already happened.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BookCat
It sounds like you put a lot of work and thought into every word of your first draft so when it's 'born' it's as perfect as a new baby, and untouchable. I find this strange, especially because you don't outline. I'm an outliner but my first drafts are 'just getting the idea down' with the thought that 'I'll make it right later'. So my drafts are infinitely changeable, I could spend forever editing. It's the same with painting (I paint cats); the pictures are never really finished, there's always something I see from the corner of my eye that I could just touch up a bit.
Your view inhibits editing, mine means I'm never satisfied with a work. There must be a happy medium.
|
If only my first drafts were perfect. I still spend months trying to clean them up. I constantly have to fight the feeling that they are untouchable, and that's what makes editing so much like work for me.
For the main part I don't mind copy-editing, going through and refining the flow of conversations and scenes, again and again until it seems right - though I still have a strong tendency to want to keep certain parts as they were first written - but development editing I find very difficult.
What I try to do is create an outline of the story alongside my first draft (written as the draft is written), and this gives me an overview that aids structural editing - but still doesn't make it easy.
Intellectually I know that you are right - that the first draft is just getting it down and I can make it right later. But the way I write makes it rather more difficult to accept that emotionally. I have this feeling that the characters were talking to me, guiding the path of the story through much of the writing, and so the first draft carries considerable emotional attachment. This may sound a little silly, and it sort of is, but it's the way stories form for me; they don't appear in full, they sort of shape themselves. (It's not quite that straightforward, a lot of background work goes on while the draft is being written, and that also helps to shape what happens.)
It always seems to me that if the story were infinitely malleable (which, of course, it is) then the first draft would be meaningless - which I don't like to accept. But at some point (it doesn't have to be the first draft, and perhaps it shouldn't be) the story has to solidify enough for each part of the story to be able to rely on the other parts. We just have to find that point, and it's seems to be different in every story I create.