Less on Writing Than Insecurities
Sep. 2nd, 2013 08:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vassalady(Heed this title. TBH, every time I try to talk about writing, it ends up being just a reflection on myself. I'm not mature enough to be able to discuss writing impartially without bringing myself and my doubts into the mix.)
What the hell do I know about writing? Not a lot, really. I mean, sure, yeah, I have a BA in Creative Writing. But what does that mean? Not much. Really, it was pretty easy to get, and you don't really need any talent to do it. The worst part was all the lit I had to take. I hate lit classes with a passion.
But this is about creative writing. Ok. So. What about it?
Hell if I know.
I recently had this semi-existential crisis about writers and writing. I realized you really didn't have to be talented or have integrity or be a decent person to be successful. For example, Twilight is insanely popular and also insanely criticized to death over the lack of quality of the writing. (I'm not fond of Twilight myself. Loved the first one, though, at the time when I read it on pain medication.) Cassandra Clare became successful despite having a sordid history with plagiarism while in fandom (and if you've recently been in the American school system, plagiarism is the academic equivalent of a felony.) And then there's Orson Scott Card, who is a staunch homophobe and active supporter of LGBT rights suppression.
Someone said to me, well, maybe you only need to have one of those things then. Because Stephanie Meyer sticks to her convictions and Card writes well. (No words were said on Clare.)
And I've been reading some more published novels recently (now that I'm not in school all the time anymore), and some of it... is surprisingly bad. They are published books, they should have some higher level of standard! Shouldn't they?
Ok, so the romance and erotica tends to be on the really bad side. Unfortunately, there just seems to be a lower standard there. Seeing as these are the two of the genres I plan to publish in, that should be heartening, right? But it's not. Because even if I think "I can do better" while reading sometimes, I don't really think I could. I mean, clearly, I'm lacking something, DESPITE NEVER HAVING TRIED TO PUBLISH ANYTHING.
(That's not entirely true. I submitted works to school publications last year. Only got accepted into one. But sadly did not get an editor's choice award at the reading. I'll admit, it stung. See, I'm just as vain and petty as everyone else deep down. Cross off decent person from the list.)
I KNOW the first draft is supposed to be shit. But I can't seem to go back and FIX the shit. Or I get so caught up in it being shit that I can't even finish that first draft.
I recognize that I can't do anything with my writing if I don't get over that. And I fully expect, once I do reach a point where I start submitting works to magazines and publishers and anthologies, that I will get rejection after rejection after rejection.
Which leads me back to: how do things EVER get published?
There's another thing that wheedles away at me, more than just the technical quality of writing. (I still really want to know how to get technically better. I don't know how; I don't really know how to write. But I'll leave that for now.) I'm bothered by my inability to come up with engaging stories. I see people criticize tropey stuff, but that's all I can ever think of it seems. I can't think "outside the box," can't come up with anything original And I don't know how to plot longer, more intricate stories, and I don't know how people do it. Or I don't go in for stuff that's tropey ENOUGH or something.
Looking at the world of both published fiction and fanfiction, there's definitely this mysterious element of hitting that right note with the general audience. For example, there was SOMETHING about Twilight that so many people loved, writing quality (and even story quality) aside. I recently read a fic that I hated, but it was super popular and had a ton of kudos and comments. Or there's this one author who I genuinely think doesn't write well at all, and they get so many hits on their stories. These people are clearly hitting some sweet spot I can't get.
This is perhaps one of the worst parts of writing. On the technical side, in part, that's something that you can improve on. You can learn grammar and plot structure. You can take advice like "don't be afraid of the word said," and "show, don't tell." But when it comes to the actual STORY? Well, that seems like if you have the creativity, you have it. And if you don't.... you don't.
How frustrating is that? And maybe that paralyzes me more than anything. I start writing and think, "This story is awful." And then I stop.
How can someone become better at inventing stories?
Did I ever tell you about some of the amazing people I went to school with? My senior year next-door neighbor wrote a nonfiction piece about herself the night before it was due. She hated it and thought it was complete bullshit, and her professor thought it was wonderful. Told her to submit it for publication. Paid publication. So she makes a list, sends if off to the first place on the list, and wham. Accepted. My senior year roommate and one of my best friends got accepted into the literary magazine and the genre magazine at my school, plus she won one of those editor awards, plus she recognized during a fiction contest that she entered. Then there was this freshman (again during my senior year) who wrote this play that was simply phenomenal. I was blown away. It was selected for the New Plays Festival we had that year for the first time (my play was rejected) AND it was fully staged, not just a staged reading. And guess what? It wasn't even finished (I thought it was while watching). It was also still an early draft. Plus, she was getting money from the school to fly out to the west coast to see one of her plays professionally produced. And she won this playwriting contest. Genius on our hands here. There was another playwright in my class who would always write these really awesome plays and win prizes in contests for them. There was a sophomore who wrote really great stuff, too, and he barely even tried. And most of my friends were Creative Writing majors, and writing always seemed to come so easy to them. They had all these fabulous, unique ideas. And they wrote well.
I look at writers I really admire, both published and fic writers. And I just wonder.. how? How do they do it?
I know a lot of things intellectually: the first draft is always shit, you need to just fucking write to improve, it's a lot about luck when attempting to get published, I shouldn't judge myself based on other people's success. But it's a lot different trying to embrace that knowledge for me.
It's a little depressing looking at my mini-library in my room. Two and a half bookcases just overflowing with novels, movies, comics, and textbooks - a fair chunk of which are devoted to writing. All those people did it somehow. They figured out how to write decently enough and engagingly enough. That shouldn't be sad at all. It should be uplifting. But it's not.
I don't know anything about writing. I mean, I can recite what people have to me and what I've read. But I haven't been able to process all that into anything useful. And maybe that comes down to the fact that, for whatever reason, I'm just flat out not doing it - not writing. Or maybe I just lack that something. Entertainment producers might call it that x factor. Something that just sparks the right way with people.
I don't write very well. I sometimes have unkind thoughts when discussing writing, such as omniscient versus limited points of view narrative. And then I recognize I'm being unkind and unfair and then I think maybe that's my problem. I can't embrace certain ways of writing, the ways that ARE popular.
I had a friend say that she thought limited POV was boring and too, well, limiting. She prefers omniscient third person. And she likes words a lot more than I do and writes a lot better than I do. She comes up with creepy and captivating stories. Me, I prefer to write in limited third. And then I wonder, well, maybe that IS too limiting.
"Limited" is probably what I would pick to describe how I feel about my writing. I feel like I have a small, limited imagination. I have a small, limited vocabulary. I have a small, limited scope and can't write grand things. I REALLY like sci-fi and fantasy. But I feel like I can't create in those genres because I can't come up with the scope needed to effectively execute a good speculative story, especially if I want to have an adventure element to it.
I just don't know how people write. People say fandom is great training grounds, but... I don't see how. I don't get constructive criticism. And writing a fic is pretty different than creating all new characters. As someone pointed out at a panel at a convention I went to recently, you can get away with saying "Steve" in an Avengers fic, but you can't just have some guy named Steve in a novel without figuring him out and explaining (showing) who he is.
I just don't know. I'll just continue to be baffled how people do it.
(For further evidence of my lack of imagination: it seems most people in fandom can scream ideas at each other excitedly, quickly building up big, intricate storylines. I.. can't. I texted a friend a vague idea once, and she asked for more, and I never gave her any more. Cause I didn't have anything. That was MONTHS ago. I still don't have anything.)
What the hell do I know about writing? Not a lot, really. I mean, sure, yeah, I have a BA in Creative Writing. But what does that mean? Not much. Really, it was pretty easy to get, and you don't really need any talent to do it. The worst part was all the lit I had to take. I hate lit classes with a passion.
But this is about creative writing. Ok. So. What about it?
Hell if I know.
I recently had this semi-existential crisis about writers and writing. I realized you really didn't have to be talented or have integrity or be a decent person to be successful. For example, Twilight is insanely popular and also insanely criticized to death over the lack of quality of the writing. (I'm not fond of Twilight myself. Loved the first one, though, at the time when I read it on pain medication.) Cassandra Clare became successful despite having a sordid history with plagiarism while in fandom (and if you've recently been in the American school system, plagiarism is the academic equivalent of a felony.) And then there's Orson Scott Card, who is a staunch homophobe and active supporter of LGBT rights suppression.
Someone said to me, well, maybe you only need to have one of those things then. Because Stephanie Meyer sticks to her convictions and Card writes well. (No words were said on Clare.)
And I've been reading some more published novels recently (now that I'm not in school all the time anymore), and some of it... is surprisingly bad. They are published books, they should have some higher level of standard! Shouldn't they?
Ok, so the romance and erotica tends to be on the really bad side. Unfortunately, there just seems to be a lower standard there. Seeing as these are the two of the genres I plan to publish in, that should be heartening, right? But it's not. Because even if I think "I can do better" while reading sometimes, I don't really think I could. I mean, clearly, I'm lacking something, DESPITE NEVER HAVING TRIED TO PUBLISH ANYTHING.
(That's not entirely true. I submitted works to school publications last year. Only got accepted into one. But sadly did not get an editor's choice award at the reading. I'll admit, it stung. See, I'm just as vain and petty as everyone else deep down. Cross off decent person from the list.)
I KNOW the first draft is supposed to be shit. But I can't seem to go back and FIX the shit. Or I get so caught up in it being shit that I can't even finish that first draft.
I recognize that I can't do anything with my writing if I don't get over that. And I fully expect, once I do reach a point where I start submitting works to magazines and publishers and anthologies, that I will get rejection after rejection after rejection.
Which leads me back to: how do things EVER get published?
There's another thing that wheedles away at me, more than just the technical quality of writing. (I still really want to know how to get technically better. I don't know how; I don't really know how to write. But I'll leave that for now.) I'm bothered by my inability to come up with engaging stories. I see people criticize tropey stuff, but that's all I can ever think of it seems. I can't think "outside the box," can't come up with anything original And I don't know how to plot longer, more intricate stories, and I don't know how people do it. Or I don't go in for stuff that's tropey ENOUGH or something.
Looking at the world of both published fiction and fanfiction, there's definitely this mysterious element of hitting that right note with the general audience. For example, there was SOMETHING about Twilight that so many people loved, writing quality (and even story quality) aside. I recently read a fic that I hated, but it was super popular and had a ton of kudos and comments. Or there's this one author who I genuinely think doesn't write well at all, and they get so many hits on their stories. These people are clearly hitting some sweet spot I can't get.
This is perhaps one of the worst parts of writing. On the technical side, in part, that's something that you can improve on. You can learn grammar and plot structure. You can take advice like "don't be afraid of the word said," and "show, don't tell." But when it comes to the actual STORY? Well, that seems like if you have the creativity, you have it. And if you don't.... you don't.
How frustrating is that? And maybe that paralyzes me more than anything. I start writing and think, "This story is awful." And then I stop.
How can someone become better at inventing stories?
Did I ever tell you about some of the amazing people I went to school with? My senior year next-door neighbor wrote a nonfiction piece about herself the night before it was due. She hated it and thought it was complete bullshit, and her professor thought it was wonderful. Told her to submit it for publication. Paid publication. So she makes a list, sends if off to the first place on the list, and wham. Accepted. My senior year roommate and one of my best friends got accepted into the literary magazine and the genre magazine at my school, plus she won one of those editor awards, plus she recognized during a fiction contest that she entered. Then there was this freshman (again during my senior year) who wrote this play that was simply phenomenal. I was blown away. It was selected for the New Plays Festival we had that year for the first time (my play was rejected) AND it was fully staged, not just a staged reading. And guess what? It wasn't even finished (I thought it was while watching). It was also still an early draft. Plus, she was getting money from the school to fly out to the west coast to see one of her plays professionally produced. And she won this playwriting contest. Genius on our hands here. There was another playwright in my class who would always write these really awesome plays and win prizes in contests for them. There was a sophomore who wrote really great stuff, too, and he barely even tried. And most of my friends were Creative Writing majors, and writing always seemed to come so easy to them. They had all these fabulous, unique ideas. And they wrote well.
I look at writers I really admire, both published and fic writers. And I just wonder.. how? How do they do it?
I know a lot of things intellectually: the first draft is always shit, you need to just fucking write to improve, it's a lot about luck when attempting to get published, I shouldn't judge myself based on other people's success. But it's a lot different trying to embrace that knowledge for me.
It's a little depressing looking at my mini-library in my room. Two and a half bookcases just overflowing with novels, movies, comics, and textbooks - a fair chunk of which are devoted to writing. All those people did it somehow. They figured out how to write decently enough and engagingly enough. That shouldn't be sad at all. It should be uplifting. But it's not.
I don't know anything about writing. I mean, I can recite what people have to me and what I've read. But I haven't been able to process all that into anything useful. And maybe that comes down to the fact that, for whatever reason, I'm just flat out not doing it - not writing. Or maybe I just lack that something. Entertainment producers might call it that x factor. Something that just sparks the right way with people.
I don't write very well. I sometimes have unkind thoughts when discussing writing, such as omniscient versus limited points of view narrative. And then I recognize I'm being unkind and unfair and then I think maybe that's my problem. I can't embrace certain ways of writing, the ways that ARE popular.
I had a friend say that she thought limited POV was boring and too, well, limiting. She prefers omniscient third person. And she likes words a lot more than I do and writes a lot better than I do. She comes up with creepy and captivating stories. Me, I prefer to write in limited third. And then I wonder, well, maybe that IS too limiting.
"Limited" is probably what I would pick to describe how I feel about my writing. I feel like I have a small, limited imagination. I have a small, limited vocabulary. I have a small, limited scope and can't write grand things. I REALLY like sci-fi and fantasy. But I feel like I can't create in those genres because I can't come up with the scope needed to effectively execute a good speculative story, especially if I want to have an adventure element to it.
I just don't know how people write. People say fandom is great training grounds, but... I don't see how. I don't get constructive criticism. And writing a fic is pretty different than creating all new characters. As someone pointed out at a panel at a convention I went to recently, you can get away with saying "Steve" in an Avengers fic, but you can't just have some guy named Steve in a novel without figuring him out and explaining (showing) who he is.
I just don't know. I'll just continue to be baffled how people do it.
(For further evidence of my lack of imagination: it seems most people in fandom can scream ideas at each other excitedly, quickly building up big, intricate storylines. I.. can't. I texted a friend a vague idea once, and she asked for more, and I never gave her any more. Cause I didn't have anything. That was MONTHS ago. I still don't have anything.)
