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

[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