How to Tame the "Self-Editing" Beast?

[AuntShecky]

How to Tame the Self-Editing Beast?

I know what you're thinking--this is out-of-character for the hypercritical Auntie whose Cardinal Rule (after "Show, Don't Tell) demands meticulous editing and revising. That dictum of course applies to "post-production"--when you've already finished the piece and are ready to post it.

What I'm talking about is "pre-production," as well as the "during": the process of writing itself. As I've mentioned before, I have found it difficult to write quickly on the computer. The very tools that make word processing so convenient --the delete key, the ability to start over and/or move text around --paradoxically slows me down. It's almost as if I have to keep writing the same passage--at times the same sentence--over and over until I am somewhat satisfied with it, or in most cases, forcing myself to give up on that one and move on.

Not only that, it has occurred to me that a creative work can be "too" disciplined, too restrained. Writing, as the late Elmore Leonard said, is supposed to be "fun" and if not, "you're not doing it right." It is fun--don't get me wrong--but I always get a peculiar feeling, a vague sense of dissatisfaction, that I've been unconsciously holding something back. A writer has to take risks!

When the writer is unconsciously risk averse, the finished product may be okay, but from another standpoint there's an odd stench of the unfinished about it, a case of half a loaf being worse than none.

I hasten to mention that I don't mean we all should start writing soft-core porno (as a controversial LitNutter once advised.) The suggestive motto of the 60s and 70s shouted "Let it all hang out," with all the lascivious imagery that implies.

What about keeping a bottle of the hard stuff in the desk drawer?I don't mean that either. The conventional wisdom that writers are heavy drinkers is a myth, I believe. I suspect that writers who were legendary tipplers --Hemingway, for instance, Dylan Thomas, Delmore Schwartz, et al. --didn't drink to prime the literary pump as much as the opposite: to self-medicate; to attempt to treat the kind of depression associated with an introspective personality; perhaps even to "come down" after sensory or emotional overload. Alcohol, as we all know, is a depressant, not a stimulant. (There are other factors that could lead a writer to the bottle--like financial problems, bad reception by the critics, family troubles, maybe his wife doesn't understand him.) Moreover, it is impossible to write a coherent sentence when one is drunk, in acute stages of intoxication alarming difficult even to locate the keyboard. Or one's fingers.

How can a writer get his or her mind to create the free-flowing, provocative, soul-stirring prose that grabs the reader's attention and squeezes hard? What about tapping into what is really "free" about "free verse" -- not self-centered, prosaic schlock but the mystical music of Whitman or Ginsberg?

This is counter-intuitive to what we've been all taught about writing: that revising and rewriting is more important than the actual writing. That's entirely true--the work has to "make sense" or at least present some kind of structural integrity. Otherwise it would be unreadable.

Indeed, it's disheartening to start reading a hopeful LitNutter's thread that is riddled with typos, misspellings, errors in logic, and worse of all, warmed-over banalities and clichés-- all posted "instantly" in order to maintain a fond delusion of "creative freedom."

Still, here's the question I'm asking you, fellow LitNutters: how can a writer to pump more exuberance into one's work, how to make both the process for the writer and the finished work for the reader exhilarating, in short--how to have more fun?

[Hawkman]

I think if one really wants to have fun writing, one has to indulge one's sense of humour. I have the least fun when writing 'straight' stories. When trying to convey "seriousness" I look at what I have written and mercilessly self-censor, which usually involves pressing the delete key until I've got a story/scenario which at least makes me smile or just a pristine white page.

Sometimes I sit down and start writing and I come up with something, which while I'm writing it seems pretty good. Then I think about what I've written and lose all faith in it. Then I'll go back and read it and think, well, this isn't actually that bad. Then I realise it's actually borderline fantasy/Sci-Fi and realise I should just bin it! Or should I? I dunno... Time to go back to the funny stuff. I know where I am with that. Trouble is, I don't have a lot to laugh at at the moment.

Ain't life a you know what...

Live and be well - H

[Jack of Hearts]

This is supposed to be fun?

Like minigolf?

The entire process has always been more transcendental than fun. Consuming, intriguing, funny-but-not-haha-funny because even the humor comes from a very dark place.

They say it's supposed to look like play. Maybe in its best moments it does, but 'play' is very serious business, as children well know.

The only thing you can do is offer yourself. That's what makes the piece invigorating. Unmitigated vulnerability. This would show itself in the prose as when bare-bones truth and resonance becomes the conceptual centerpiece of the work, the author (with varying degrees of success) would make stylistic decisions that cater toward that.

And unfortunately some will perish. Nothing's perfect and nothing's free. You make your offering, and it could be the truest (whatever that means. That's probably the process itself, that question), most beautiful offering the moment could birth, but there's always the risk of being open. If there were no risk, there would be no reward.

The risk, of course, is allowing others a peek into your very psyche. When you write about, say, motherhood, or women, or love, or sibling rivalry, you're playing with those concepts as they exist in your mind. There's no objectivity to it. Show us your concept of 'mother,' and maybe you're in some degree telling us about your own mother, or yourself as a mother.

The trick is an old notion that is found in epistemology-- that human beings are 'sensitive to the truth.' We can detect and be drawn toward degrees of authenticity. That truth resonates, something true for many or even most people across a given spectrum. If you don't believe this (not necessarily without qualification), we're on unequal subjective footing and can't even coherently disagree with each other. How does literature persist if it does not resonate? This is a belief about the world that precedes empirical demonstration and evades religious affiliation-- it's a description about the world that you must make a decision about, and even 'in between' yes and no is in fact a decision.






J

[YesNo]

Keeping a bottle of the hard stuff in the drawer doesn't help much with either with writing or editing. Gettting it out of the drawer just makes things worse.

I find it difficult writing more than a few hundred words about anything whether that's soft-core porno, humor or something supposedly serious. I can't imagine how someone can write tens of thousands of words. And then one has to edit all of it. Since people actually do such things, I see the problem is all in my mind.

[Calidore]

"There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting." -- Robert Graves

[Grit]

Aunty Shecks,

I join the discussion as a simple reader. I have never figured out editing, I have always hated it and I find it ruins my stories.

It sounds like you can't turn your editing voice off. I would recommend you approach your first pass without any expectations of a polished product. Just get it all out there, like you allude to. Then, once you've got it all out there, you can go back over it with a scalpel. Slice and carve away, until something beautiful remains.

For your first draft, imagine you are god. You are capturing thoughts, trying to catch every detail before it disappears into the cosmos.

Then you can play plastic surgeon and make your rough creations beautiful.

Think of it as another form of discipline. Refusing to edit until your bow-legged baby until it looks up at you with it's wonky, albeit fully-formed eyes. That's when it's ready for a face-lift.

[Emil Miller]

This is an interesting subject that presupposes a median point at which editing serves to clarify without detracting from the expressiveness of the writing.
I have just been reading Orwell's five rules for good writing and, while they are sound, as with similar advice from other important writers, if applied too liberally they can cramp a writer's style. I think it would be fair to say that Orwell was a better essayist than a novelist and it might well be as a result of his concentration on the nuts and bolts to the detriment of the finished product. In writing an essay, the shortness of the work requires less overall contemplation than that of writing a novel as it allows for attention to content without having to concentrate unduly on form.
In applying common sense rules to what one is writing certain pitfalls can be avoided but it is the writer's character as reflected in his work, or style as it's often referred to, that is as important for establishing it as being worth the reader's money and time. Apart from trying to avoid padding, my favourite rule for writing is something I read recently:

If you want to be understood, if you want your ideas to spread, using effective language must be your top priority.

[AuntShecky]

Thank you fellow LitNutters for weighing in on this. Incidentally, the title to this thread seems a bit paradoxical-- the desired effect would be to unlock --what? the creative impulse?-- rather than to "tame" something, especially when excessive inhibition is the problem.

I plugged "Inhibitions and writing" into the "Google" machine, which yielded web pages revealing interesting info, as well as some surprises. For instance, yours fooly found that Henry Miller, a writer whose style was not in the least restrained, actually followed a strict daily writing regimen.

For your first draft, imagine you are god.

Jack Kerouac's thoughts on writing were, as you might expect, flights of fancy. But one of his mantras was "You're a genius all the time." That might be a good one to keep in the back of my mind to dispel initial doubts about a project as long as I don't start parroting it around as if it were true. More up my proberbial alley is another's short, sweet, and simple advice: "Don't be nervous."

Ultimately it's about confidence, right? For the past several months I've been compiling material about self-confidence in writing, and I probably should try to put the material in some kind of post-able form.

The answer is to strike a balance between artistic freedom and attention to coherent form. (Both sides of the brain are involved in the process.)

Now if I could only put this technique into practice!

[tailor STATELY]

The ultimate answer is to strike a balance between artistic freedom and attention to coherent form.

Well put. Taking chances often yields surprising results.

Form or formlessness
or form hidden unto itself;
if only I could write poetry
like jazz

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor STATELY