Hi! And Happy New year, etc.
Er… like most things, there’s various schools of thought on this. Did you see this Gifset about Stephen King and George RR Martin talking about work methods? And the quote attached to it from Calvino? Well, that’s a fairly hefty schism. There’s Vonnegut’s Swoopers vs Bashers too (”Swoopers write a story quickly, higgledy-piggledy, crinkum-crankum, any which way. Then they go over it again painstakingly, fixing everything that is just plain awful or doesn’t work. Bashers go one sentence at a time, getting it exactly right before they go on to the next one. When they’re done they’re done.”). Worth noting the bias in that one, of course - Vonnegut is a self-described basher, and the quotes that follow it show no understanding of swoopers.
(And from that, you may guess my bias - through that filter, I’m a swooper. I think that level of analysis of a sentence out of context is pointless. You’re writing a story. Sentences are only really good or bad depending on how they serve a larger purpose)
But binaries are also rubbish. The map is not the terrain and all that.
In other words: be careful with advice on this. This may not be you. Whatever works works. Discovering what works for you is the key thing. Maybe you lean basher. That’s fine. Being in a corner with Vonnegut isn’t a bad thing.
(No-one leaves Vonnegut in the corner, cue dance routine, we’ve had the time of our life, so it goes.)
Generally speaking, being a working writer working in a pulp corner of the media and with other people relying on me to earn money (I think it was Ivan Brandon who argued if you leave your artist without pages, you should pay their rent.) Doing the job is, involves doing the job.
You’re correct that it’s rarely as bad as you think it is.
At the same time, it’s also almost always easier to edit something than to write something. So write anything. You can always delete it. At the absolute worst, by writing it ,you’ve discovered one thing which ISN’T right. More likely, when it’s on the page you can sit back and realise what’s wrong with that take. What’s false? What’s missing? How can you change it to make it so?
That said, if something isn’t time critical, and there’s any other option, sometimes you know you’re not ready to write this, and you should press abort. In the notes for WicDiv 24 I wrote about my first draft of the first few pages. Now, that is almost identical in “story content” as what was printed, but was shit, or at least weightless. When writing it, I then stepped way back, realising I wasn’t ready to write the issue, and went and worked on other things to leave things to cook more. I just didn’t really know what was happening, on a much deeper level.
Now “I’m not ready to do this” is a good thing to lead you to procrastinate, so be careful with letting yourself off the hook too much, but sometimes you’re just not ready to do it, and you have to accept it.
But generally speaking, if you now the story, almost any tactics you can do to do some kind of first draft will be more easily edited than a blank page. Literally any tactic. Write it out of order. Write it without dialogue. Write it without description. Anything.
And now to go and try and prove this right with WicDiv 26′s script, which needs to get over to Jamie today, and - oh my! - have I some things to tweak.
