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Or to be more specific, do you ever finish a project only to become convinced it is utter garbage?
How do you stop yourself from stoking the furnace with your manuscripts?
How do you stop yourself from stoking the furnace with your manuscripts?
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Re: Ever write a bunch of crap?
Tue, April 10, 2007 - 2:51 PMFor me, the top drawer of my cabinet by my computer works well. It's almost a given that at some point either during or after the writing process I am going to consider it unmitigated tripe. But I do find that if I let it sit off to the side and get to working immediately on something else, that the gestation period helps. I can divorce myself from the pain and anguish of the writing process...as well as the doubts, reservations and fears...and come back to it with a fresh eye and renewed sense of hope.
But think about it this way. If we wrote the perfect book or story, there'd be no point ever writing anything again, because we'd never be able to duplicate that perfection. Part of the craft is wrestling with our own shortcomings as writers and continually looking for new and better ways to articulate our views and observations. That's our life. That's our art. Feeling like what we've written is shitty is part of the bargain. It just means that you are questioning yourself and pushing to revise what you've written into the best, most polished, final possible.
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Re: Ever write a bunch of crap?
Tue, April 10, 2007 - 4:05 PMI love my crap.
I consider much of it unsalvageable. I keep it anyway. Some of it is 35 years old.
I've got some stuff from 20+ years ago that I might be able to cannibalize from some day. I also keep it to remind me of where I've been. Sometimes it teaches me about my patterns, much in the way that my journal does.
I've got more recent work that I think is salvageable with a honking major rewrite. It's in the "deep freeze" (i.e., a plastic file drawer), waiting patiently for when I'm done doing other things.
I deal a little bit with love-of-crap in my article "'Ouch!': Writing Through Upheaval," originally published in _Empire: For the SF Writer_ in 1985 and now posted on my website at:
home.earthlink.net/~emalcoh...html#ouch
In particular the section "Love Your Mutants." -
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Re: Ever write a bunch of crap?
Tue, April 10, 2007 - 4:08 PMAwesome, Elissa! Thanks! -
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Unsu...
Re: Ever write a bunch of crap?
Thu, April 12, 2007 - 2:40 PMAll the time. Some of it is utterly bad, like the first one or two pancakes or waffles that tossed. Other times it looks like crap but, like in the alchemy symbolism, becomes the "prima materia" for later use.
I expect to write crap (or what I call, the perpetual warm-up). -
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Re: Ever write a bunch of crap?
Thu, April 12, 2007 - 2:43 PMShitty first drafts. -
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Re: Ever write a bunch of crap?
Fri, April 13, 2007 - 11:47 AMthat's what I consider mine,shitty first drafts,but it's MY shitty first drafts so the end up in cold storage until they either make sense at some later date or just another attempt at trying to become a writer.
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