A Hundred Stretches Hence

I’m not writing a damned thing.  I am — actually, have long been — in a prolonged writing drought that is pretty much crushing the joy of writing right out of me.  And the cause of it all is that bastard staring me in the face when I shave — okay, whenever I bother to shave anyway.

I sat down the other night and thought about this for several hours.  Here’s how I’ve been screwing myself up:  I get an excellent idea and really get excited about it, so I jot down some notes, scribble a few lines about the setting, and write out something about the characters.  Then I start researching stuff.  Researching lots of stuff.  I see it clearly.  I know I do it every damned time.  And I just had to ask myself: Why?

Well, this is the answer I found: I waste so damned much time and let all the creative steam get away from me because I want the story to be brilliant — not after crits and a few edits, but running right out of the blocks.  I want it to be original, insightful, profound, and maybe even witty.  I want to produce a brilliant piece of work, and I start to worry way too much about theme, strategy, plot, and characterization.  Note that nowhere in there did I spend much time speaking to the story.  (You should’ve said “AHA!” right about then.  I did.)

I’m a perfectionist, I guess.  Well, there’s no room for perfectionist bullshit in the process of writing a story’s first draft.  Perfectionism — my believing that perfection can and should be attained — isn’t that big a deal in most things, except that it’s a huge obstacle for me in writing.  Especially in producing that all important first draft.

Sometimes, I believe my perfectionism truly reaches to the darker, more sinister edges of the pathological form where everything less than absolutely perfect is totally unacceptable.  And, so, I stall, procrastinate, working harder at heading off the totally unacceptable, all the “it’s good enough for now, let’s get down the whole story and worry about it in the first edit” stuff that is supposed to be tolerated in a first draft and instead either I never really get off to much of a start or I bog down in endless revisions without much forward progress.

How many times have you read that a writer needs to throw away about a million words in learning the craft?  If I’ve read it once, I’ve read it hundreds of times over the years.  How many words have I written and thrown out over those years, all the while knowing that as I admit I did?  Probably not much more than a quarter of that, to be honest.  And if I don’t count the usual crap I do where I write down ideas and characters’ backstories, etc. — all the stuff I do instead of really writing for story, beginning to end with a real middle in there to wrestle with — then it’s closer to not very much over a tenth of that million words.

I know I can write well.  I have an excellent grasp of the basic tools we’re all supposed to have coming out of school these days — spelling, vocabulary, grammar, style — and I have a better than average grasp of the more specialized knowledge required to become a good, real writer.  But the problem I have now — have had for a long time now — is that I haven’t applied the knowledge to using the tools.  I have to write that million words.  I have to just write, not write perfectly.  I have to write crap if that’s what it takes, so long as I write stories — not brilliant, perfect, original stories that are insightful, profound, and witty, but just stories.  And that may mean that I have to shelf Miravur for now.  I’m nowhere near the writer for the job right now — not to write it the way I see it in my head.

So, even though I’ve been fiddling around with writing for more than 25 years, even though I’ve “won” NaNoWriMo twice, even though I’ve easily spent a fortune on books both for reading and about writing, I account it all for nothing.  Here’s eraser on chalkboard — wipe it all away.  I start all over today.

So, as of right now my wordcount is zero.  Today, I start writing that million words.  A million words of story.  And when I get that out of the way, maybe I’ll have learned to write well enough to come back to Miravur.