Writerly Ways

[cornerofmadness]

Made it back to OH.

Wasn't going to do a writerly ways this weekend but one of my friends struck up a conversation with me about it so....


i've had white page syndrome all week. my friend defined it as 'It's when the computer with its pages laughs back at you, come on fucker, you know you can't beat me, nah-nah-nah-nah, and sentences arrive on it bloodied and gasping for life, like cripples born on a battlefield' Boy does that sound familiar.

Usually I write fast. I honestly rarely agonize over a word but then again my first drafts are rough, frightening things, often nothing but talking heads awaiting another go around. I'm not sure i've ever thought about how i write much.

I'm sloppy. That's the first thing that comes to mind. I'm as sloppy in my writing as I am in my every day life. The punctuation barely exists. I know whole things will have to be shifted about or deleted. I know my first readers will throw things at me screaming 'more description' But for the most part i hear the characters and they tell me what to write and if it's fanfiction, if i can't hear that character I rarely write them well.

thoughts? sound familiar? Totally opposite of how you write?


and in case you missed it Holiday Card Request

And if you usually get one from me...still tell me you want one. trust me i won't remember unless i have a list

Comments

[leni-ba.livejournal.com]

I usually start in the middle. Mind you, when I start, I don't know it will be the middle; but somewhere down the story I'll realize the scene needs some more explanation, so I'll end up adding some sentences/parragraphs/Willow's 3567 words rant to the top of the page.

I pause a lot. Especially when I'm trying to describe movement. I actually had this little notebook divided in hand movement / facial expressions / body movements / moving... and there was one more category, I'm sure.... Oh yeah! Manners of speech. I kinda lost that notebook, and haven't really gotten up to redoing the whole thing, but some of it stayed with me.

If I had a Thesaurus, it would be my best friend. As it is, I press Alt+F7 like crazy.

Hmmm... Oh yes, and I shouldn't be allowed to take breaks. Once I take a break from a story, chances are I'll never continue it. Ditto for stuff I write in notebooks; to type it, it has to be something that a) it's meant for someone else or b) I'm dying to know everyone else's opinion.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

i'm an expert at the stopping something and letting it die. Witness FIVE nano 'wins' languishing

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

I wrote a little yesterday while watching Beowulf. No one's talking in my head. It's making me cranky.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

i think havng to look at family for an extended period gives you white page syn.

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

hmmm, that could be it, indeed.

[chaos-by-design.livejournal.com]

Your assessment of your writing seems pretty accurate to me.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

nods, yeah I'm pretty sure this is accurate for me. At least I know my faults

[rahirah]

Total opposite. I couldn't write without punctuation and I'm constantly revising as I go - which doesn't mean I won't revise more when the betas get done with it.

I kind of see scenes playing out like little three-D sensurround movies in my head, that I can rewind and try all different ways...

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

i do get those movies in my head but i do seem to lack the ability to pull the description with it when i set them down. But yeah, it's awful the way i deal with punctuation

[enemytosleep]

You've just kicked out a shit ton of writing. The brain needed a little break. Hopefully this week will fair better.

Clicked.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

the brain did but i know a lot of it was from me just playing around on facebook

[rain-oubliette.livejournal.com]

Card me. :) I have one for you.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

i figured you might

[rain-oubliette.livejournal.com]

Thx.

Also, I apologize for making the Steelers lose on Sunday. I hate the Baltimore Ravens... so I root for whomever is the opposing team. I'm a jinx.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

don't worry the Steelers have a lot of injuries and are otherwise stinking up the place

[mulzrule.livejournal.com]

Lol at that first paragraph. Maybe this is why Stephen King always writes about writers going clinically insane.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

exactly

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

I'm not that sloppy, although if I'm really cooking I tend to not worry as much about grammar, spelling as such. when I sit down for a writing session on a long work, I go over the previous days work and make changes here and there, so that by the time I get done with the first draft it's usually in pretty good shape.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

i tend to print out my longer works and correct things a chapter at a time. Otherwise i burn out and miss stuff

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

Burn out is a constant problem. I generally go through that first draft -- which is really two in one -- then another draft in which I try to catch everything I missed the first time. Then I put the manuscript aside for at least a month, and go back for a cold reading in which I usually catch problems I didn't see beforet. During that month I'll have a couple of other people read it, and *they* usually find some problems I missed. So that leads to another draft, then I go through a series of searches for specific words or problem areas -- words ending in "ly", for instance, or the word "has", in the hopes of making the story more active.

Then there's one last read through, if I can stomach it, before I send it off to a publisher. So, yeah -- burnout, big danger.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

i do things pretty much this way too

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

I think we already agreed that great minds think alike. :-)

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

indeed