REJOINTS! young men have young knees!

pagalini:

the third in a series of presentations I did about Creative Writing for students in my school who were interested in it (I’m in the business, so I was asked to talk about the things I’ve learned since my work was noticed). 

I’m willing to send my presentations to those who want them :) apart from this I did one on creative writing in general and one on character crafting. 

I’m also willing to answer questions about what it’s like to work with an editor and what kind of things will be asked of you.   ^____^

While I think this can be good advice for some — and really every writer should try out the plotting and planning methods a few time I am not sure that I agree even … 70% …

I mean, particularly with the “winging it” method slide!  Part of this is because I think a lot of writing is trapped in this idea of DOING WRITING THIS WAY WILL YIELD BETTER FIRST TIME RESULTS => YIELDING BETTER PRODUCTS => BETTER WRITING.  V. Reductive on my side, I know.  We also have to be careful of the sort of urban legend of I HAD A ROLL OF TYPE-PAPER AND A TYPEWRITER AND TYPED UNTIL THE PAPER WAS GONE WITHOUT PLANNING AND IT WAS GREAT~ I AM A GENIUS~~~.

What I would like to see more often in ADVICE ABOUT WRITING posts is less of a focus on the genesis and beginning of a piece.  (Naturally this isn’t going to work for everyone, etc!)  But the idea of GET A GOOD START YOU WILL GET A GOOD PRODUCT, FOLLOW THE LINEAR LINE TO SUCCESS seems to be the impression I get from a lot of advice about writing.  You hear it all the time in most of the trite writing advices you get — begin at the beginning, write what you know, etc.  It all points back to HAVE A GOOD GENESIS/SEED/GOOD BEGINNING.  And, well, it is helpful.

But my own personal process is more like making jewelry out of silt in a river.  A lot of aimless sifting, a bunch of editing, five hundred bajillion drafts of refinement, etc.  Fuck yeah I wing it all the time!  But I don’t wing it into a finished product.  I guess …

I wish there was more of an emphasis on being comfortable as a writer — having the confidence to follow through what you want to write and then more emphasis on “ok I have this thing I want to do but I don’t know how to make it speak to other people.”  As opposed to Proper Processing and Proper Writing and so forth.

[edit] I SHOULD SAY this post is not really directed at the post I reblogged so much as there was a PROMPTED BY SEEING THIS => oh shit time for AJ to be an expulsive asshole on topics, etc.