Quote:
Originally Posted by Wallace Lee
To put it short, I somewhat failed in explaining me.
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But there always are, and when I cut them down, a part of me would like to let them stay even if I know that it's wrong. And the reason is that I am attached to everything I wrote, the good parts as the bad ones.
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(Quote cut for brevity only.)
You did very much better this time ... or, at least, in a manner I can relate to very well. Like you, I explore the story by writing it and then have to clean it up after. Trying to find all the extraneous ("focusing") parts can be difficult, not only because of my attachment, but also in learning to trust the reader and realise that they don't need to be told everything that I had to explore to get to the end. It sometimes feels like I am short-changing the reader by not telling them the whole of the story that I found. But, of course, it doesn't actually work like that.
You say you don't know if your ideas "will become tales or novels", and I can related to this too. Yes, I have had some that were obviously short stories from the off (quite surprised me when it first happened), and some that seem so big that they get put aside as too daunting while I'm also trying to work for a living. But most I just have to explore and find out what it wants to be.
I have tried outlining stories, but the ideas don't come (or none that I want to read about). Whereas, by writing the story from within the story, the ideas just keeping coming - which is a different sort of problem altogether.
One thing that has added to my attachment to my written words is a strange sort of joy when pieces I wrote earlier fall into place later, as if they were planned, though - if they were - it was not conscious. When you see this start to happen you get the feeling of having gotten it right. It is when this happens in significant plot points that I come the closest to having "darlings" in my writing - but this is not quite the same thing as (I believe) was meant by Quiller-Couch or Faulkner.