T-minus . . .
[Storytellers Unplugged, February 9, 2008; found via the Wayback Machine by an awesome reader]
This post is late--well, later than I like, anyway--because I am currently under internet radio silence while I try to rewrite Corambis for a March 31st deadline. I check my mail (and icanhascheezburger) once a day, and other than that, I am head down in the book. And yesterday, I did not say to myself, Self, today is February 28th and it’s a leap year, so tomorrow is February 29th. And, Self, do we remember what the 29th means?
Nope. Did not happen. This is, in other words, a completely improvised post. With real-time typing and everything. Kids, don’t try this at home. I am a trained professional.
Not that you’d know it by the way I flail and thrash and kvetch through this rewrite.
That’s the thing about writing. It doesn’t get easier with practice. It gets harder. The more you know about writing, the more excruciatingly aware you become of your mistakes and the flaws in your process and everything else separating you from the perfection you strive for. Innocent confidence may be weak, as Richard Sennett says, but I have to admit I have some nostalgia for it. Not a lot of nostalgia, mind you, because along with the innocent confidence comes the arrogance and the know-it-all-ness and the general behaving like an asshole and the boatloads and boatloads of future embarrassment, but when you don’t know everything that can go wrong, when you trust your own infallibility, you can damn the torpedoes and run full speed ahead and enjoy it. (And get blown out of the water, but that’s another story.)
Or, to put it another way, you don’t have to think so damn much.
But the better you get as a writer, the more your improvement is a result of thinking about what you’re doing, both in the moment (grammar, punctuation, phrasing, word repetition and whether it’s a bug or a feature in this particular instance, etc. etc.) and from the perspective outside your own real-time typing experience, in which you’re considering what has happened in the story and what’s going to happen in the story, and what this current scene can do to carry a theme through, to echo and foreshadow, to plant clues for future revelations, to provide payoff for previously planted clues, to balance with the scenes on other side, to provide character development, plot development, world development, all the ten thousand and sixty-five tiny intricately meshing cogs that, in theory, work together to make a story.
And, of course, to make the end product look seamless. Sprezzatura, the Renaissance Italian courtiers called it: the art of doing something incredibly difficult and making it look easy. [The same concept also applies, in spades, to dressage. --Ed. 03/13/2016] I’m completely abrogating sprezzatura here, of course, because I’m telling the world how hard it all is, but that doesn’t change the fact that the book itself had better have sprezzatura; my angst and misery and crises of faith (there have been several) will be invisible.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think I knew what I was doing all along. And that’s the magic trick.
Shazam.
This post is late--well, later than I like, anyway--because I am currently under internet radio silence while I try to rewrite Corambis for a March 31st deadline. I check my mail (and icanhascheezburger) once a day, and other than that, I am head down in the book. And yesterday, I did not say to myself, Self, today is February 28th and it’s a leap year, so tomorrow is February 29th. And, Self, do we remember what the 29th means?
Nope. Did not happen. This is, in other words, a completely improvised post. With real-time typing and everything. Kids, don’t try this at home. I am a trained professional.
Not that you’d know it by the way I flail and thrash and kvetch through this rewrite.
That’s the thing about writing. It doesn’t get easier with practice. It gets harder. The more you know about writing, the more excruciatingly aware you become of your mistakes and the flaws in your process and everything else separating you from the perfection you strive for. Innocent confidence may be weak, as Richard Sennett says, but I have to admit I have some nostalgia for it. Not a lot of nostalgia, mind you, because along with the innocent confidence comes the arrogance and the know-it-all-ness and the general behaving like an asshole and the boatloads and boatloads of future embarrassment, but when you don’t know everything that can go wrong, when you trust your own infallibility, you can damn the torpedoes and run full speed ahead and enjoy it. (And get blown out of the water, but that’s another story.)
Or, to put it another way, you don’t have to think so damn much.
But the better you get as a writer, the more your improvement is a result of thinking about what you’re doing, both in the moment (grammar, punctuation, phrasing, word repetition and whether it’s a bug or a feature in this particular instance, etc. etc.) and from the perspective outside your own real-time typing experience, in which you’re considering what has happened in the story and what’s going to happen in the story, and what this current scene can do to carry a theme through, to echo and foreshadow, to plant clues for future revelations, to provide payoff for previously planted clues, to balance with the scenes on other side, to provide character development, plot development, world development, all the ten thousand and sixty-five tiny intricately meshing cogs that, in theory, work together to make a story.
And, of course, to make the end product look seamless. Sprezzatura, the Renaissance Italian courtiers called it: the art of doing something incredibly difficult and making it look easy. [The same concept also applies, in spades, to dressage. --Ed. 03/13/2016] I’m completely abrogating sprezzatura here, of course, because I’m telling the world how hard it all is, but that doesn’t change the fact that the book itself had better have sprezzatura; my angst and misery and crises of faith (there have been several) will be invisible.
If you didn’t know better, you’d think I knew what I was doing all along. And that’s the magic trick.
Shazam.
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