Yup. Layers. Changing your way of thinking and looking at the world isn’t easy and it doesn’t shift overnight. Repeatedly banging your head against the same walls can help. Wait, I mean repeatedly exposing yourself to the same ideas in different venues, formats and states of mind. I decided to subject you to some snippets from my journal this week. The self-doubt isn’t as high today, honest.
Layers, must add more layers.
I need to think in layers and realize they’re a good and natural process. Nothing is wrong with getting the action down on the page and going back to add in what they’re thinking or experiencing. I do this with dialogue all the time. I need to expand the way I think to include other layers. An onion, or even an ogre, doesn’t have one or two layers. I need to dig deeper and add more little touches everywhere.
I don’t have a slick, clean, sparse voice like Janet Evanovich or Robert Parker. I can live with this. However, I need to be able to take my bland and boring basic sentences without any punch to them and ratchet them up to the next level.
Maybe I possess no real talent for this, or else I’m just doubting myself and questioning the effort to get through this phase. Perhaps I’m biased because I’ve seen DH and others make the art look so effortless. Painters don’t sit down and produce masterpieces. Layers and layers of paint are applied to reach the final image. Sculptors also work with layers. The armature is their rough draft. The form has to be built upon to reach the final stages.
Writing is no different. I need to get past this gestural phrase. Because honestly, that’s all it is. I’m making rough sketches toward what I want the final story to become. Some of my strokes are more confident and better delineate what I’m going for, but they’re still only rough guidelines of where I need to apply more effort later.
I think this is what’s most frustrating. I like seeing things done. Either that or I like to fiddle and play with them forever. However, none of my fiddling has amounted to a significant change. Nothing seems to change the existing functionality of previous versions.
I could be just fooling myself into thinking I can do this. Then again, I should question whether I do give my all or if I coast along, drifting and not pushing myself. That’s always a possibility. I’m wishy-washy on what my actual goals are and why I want to do this. I don’t have the drive to publish I see in other Divas. I don’t know if that’s a fear of success or laziness and lack of focus and ambition.
I don’t like to think I have no drive, no passion, no desire to make something of myself. I hate how I don’t mind shuffling along and ignoring how the world passes me by some days. I feel like I should do something, be someone, but most days, I’m not sure how to do that.
I’ve always been “adequate enough” at everything I attempt. I’d say the text game I worked on for a decade was probably one of the few places where I strove to do things better all the time. I don’t know if others would agree, because I did a hell of a lot of coasting too, but for a while, I was dedicated to bringing a deeper and better experience to the players in the areas I built and maintained.
I suspect that’s part of my problem with writing. I get the equivalent of the rooms and mobs done and think I have accomplished something. Either no ACTS exist to animate them or if there are, they’re sketchy and inconsistent. All of Janet Evanovich’s characters possess the equivalent of full libraries of ACTS behind them. Her settings are rich with revisited details. They’re familiar (some even say repetitive), but also resonant.
It’s likely I’m too close to what I’ve written still, but damn, I have trouble seeing where and how to improve what’s already on the page. I find it very difficult if the improvements require cutting something out. To my mind, that aspect is the most foreign.
Hey, I fight the same problem. I look at other people on Divas and think, “what the hell is wrong with me, why can’t I write faster, cleaner, better (insert something else that I probably haven’t thought of here).” And there was a time when I could, and there will probably be a time when I will again–but your kids are still young, and you have a family, and you care about them–and you have a good marriage. And time–like Seneca says, is your only coin. You shouldn’t let other people spend it for you. It’s not bottomless like a fairy-tale purse. You can bankrupt yourself and end up empty in both respects.
Cut yourself some slack. You’ve grown. If you were to take a poll of all the people who’ve published or are driving for publication, and maybe you should–you know for informational purposes? You would probably find that the ones who consistently produce–good stuff, not bad stuff–in full length fiction, are probably either older, younger, in college, have no children–and if they do have a husband and children, are not working full-time or have a white collar job and don’t see their family. Or–and this is a big or–are simply writing a lot of short stories, which translate into a long list of auto-sigs that don’t say, “hey, I’m only forty pages long”.
I think I was just whiny on Wednesday, Jodi. I may have included too much of the whinge and lost the focus on the idea that all art is “composed” of layers whether it’s graphical, musical, structural, or aural or written.
I’m honestly very happy with the progress I’ve made in the last year. I just had to remind myself that Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will any of these stories be perfect on the first few rounds of revision. I’m building a new toolset so my “fiddling” can make actual improvements instead of just changing the way a sentence is rearranged or a word here and there.
Oops! I actually missed my journal anniversary. I started last June 26th and I’m up to 68 consecutive days. Go me!
Speaking of onions and layers, they’re giving “Shrek” tonight (twice) on TV. We’re having a shrek-y night with stuff with onion. Hahaha!
As for writing, faster writing doesn’t mean better writing, you know. Sometimes those who claim to write fast just simply write whatever pops in their minds and then have to end up cutting more than half of what they have written. You have your own style of approaching writing, which is yours and yours alone. Embrace it!
I can’t sit and compare myself to others. If I do that, I don’t write and lately, writing comes hard because I’m just not feeling so hot physically. If I compared myself to the other people I read, I would give up. I’m lucky in one respect though. At the Bar, I get constant encouragement and accolades. The other writers are pretty supportive and after I post I get messages from them about how much they liked what I wrote. The pats on the back help a lot. Not comparing apples or oranges helps too. 😉 I’m pretty sure your stuff isn’t as bad as you think it is.