posted
This post will probably seem very random at first, but I feel all of it is necessary to get the entire point across. Feel free to ignore me.
Ever since I realized writing books was actually a job, I wanted it to by my job.
So when I was younger I would come up with hundreds of neat story ideas, create interesting titles for them, muse about what the blurb on the books back cover would say, and even create book covers. But I hardly ever did any actual writing.
Flash forward several years to middle school. My English teachers, as much as I hated the attention, loved my work and were always telling me that I only needed to apply myself to succeed at anything I wanted to do. But I didn't apply myself. At anything.
In High School, I failed two English classes but scored a 35 on the English section of the ACT. I barely graduated, but with a 4.0 grade point average my entire senior year, during which I took a Creative Writing course and several concurrent enrollment college classes.
I've always taken it for granted that I was good at anything I wanted to be good at without much work. But recently I tried to write a paper for a class I have, and my writing was terrible. I could not believe the words appearing on the page had come from me. My power over the English had vanished. So I got thinking, and realized that I have not come up with a good story idea in maybe as long as a year. I haven't written a story for months, and I haven't even seriously considered doing so for about as long.
What's wrong with me? In my golden youth, I conjured dozens of amazing ideas on a daily basis, and now I can barely string together a coherent sentence. Has my muse left me for a more dedicated someone else? I never had to work hard for my writing ability before. Quite simply, I never had to work for it at all. Have my long periods of disuse finally caught up with me?
Is my ability to write deteriorating? Has anyone else ever had this problem? Help!
posted
I could say something here, but really you've mostly said all of that for me. I'm pretty much in the same boat as you are - I created hundreds of story ideas, titles and even blurbs just like you (I pretty much attribute it to a combination of an overactive imagination and ADD, two attributes I still possess in spades The only differences is that I was actually a pretty good writer in high school - aced the AP English tests (including a full 5 on the Lit exam), actually tested out of my required English courses in college and will soon enter the working world as a professional technical writer & editor - and still, even then, my writing, especially my creative writing feels rather subpar. I've been struggling over trying to perfect the good "hook" for my fragments, not to mention all the other areas I'm weak in such as dialogue, and it's all driving me crazy. I've recently began wondering if my story ideas or my "creative style" for lack of a better term is actually better suited towards another medium such as motion picture rather than the written word (see previous thread on that subject). I just don't know what to effin' do anymore.
Posts: 45 | Registered: Sep 2006
| IP: Logged |
posted
In my experience, your writing skills are not unlike your muscles. If you go too long without exercising, your muscles get flabby and weak, and will eventually atrophy. However, by exercising those muscles, or by rehabilitating atrophied muscles, you can regain your strength. Atrophied writing skills are no different. It takes a lot of work, but one can crawl back from the metaphorical edge.
Something similar happened to me a number of years ago. I literally burned myself out writing and reading...it sounds ridiculous, but it's true. For almost six months, I couldn't stand to look at a book or word processor window, much less work on either. After this bout of irrational disinterest passed, and I tried writing again, I found myself supremely disgusted with my apparent inability to produce anything coherent. But I didn't give up. I knuckled down and kept at it...kept reading various materials from various genres, and kept writing. However, I was careful not to saturate too much of my time with either activity, so I wouldn't burn out all over again.
And it worked. It was a long, painful process, but I was able to get my writing 'muscles' back into shape. I encourage you to A.) pace yourself and develop some kind of writing schedule (and stick to it until you feel you're back up to speed), and B.) don't get too discouraged about your current efforts. It's natural for the ol' noggin to get a bit rusty when you don't use it a certain way. But don't give up!
Trust me, there's always light at the end of the tunnel.
Inkwell ----------------- "The difference between a writer and someone who says they want to write is merely the width of a postage stamp." -Anonymous
[This message has been edited by Inkwell (edited September 30, 2006).]
posted
There is a difference between fantasizing about writing, and writing. Writing is not unlike any other creative skill, like, say, woodworking or cooking or sculpture or painting with watercolors. You don't look at a finely crafted piece of woodworking and think to yourself, "I'll bet that person was born being able to do this." No, you look at a work of art and think to yourself, "Good heavens, it must have taken years to get that good." If you want to get good at writing, you have to knuckle down and write. There is no other alternative. And, as they say, you have to write at least a million words to get good. So there's your goal. How close to a million words are you, in actual writing?
The ego tends to side-track us with distractions. It's a form of fear... we doodle with words and putz around (or post on internet writing forums) instead of disciplining ourselves to actually WRITE the stories in our heads.
I heartily agree that the less I write, the more disconnected I feel from the process. The more I write, the more enchanted I am with the process. In fact, the harder it is for me to stop writing.
The only solution to your dilemma is to write STORIES, not word-doodles. Don't worry that they're crap. Just write. Pretty soon your ego will realize that you are serious about it, it will shut up, and the good words will begin flowing again.
posted
Elan's sculpture analogy is very apt. I'm a professional sculptor as well as a budding writer (and hey, I've done way over a million words - I should be published soon, right??? Hope springs eternal. . .). Anyway, as a sculptor, I worked VERY HARD to learn the craft - I'm self-taught, and honed my skills with workshops (which isn't a bad idea for you, either - there are tons of writing workshops, far more than there are for sculpture). What really toasts my cookies is when someone looks at a sculpture that took me three months to create in clay, then two to four months to cast in bronze, and they say to their spouse (and this is an actual quote), "You could do that with your Exacto knife, honey." To which I replied (while biting my tongue to keep from saying more, "No. She couldn't." Grrrrrrrrrrrrr. It took me *years* of knowing horses, years of making comical things because I didn't think I could make realistic horses, and years more of workshops on anatomy, technique, etc., to get to the level I am now (internationally collected, with trophies I've made in some of the top race and show barns in three countries -- Funny Cide, who won the Derby a couple of years ago, has one of my trophies, and two other trophies of mine are awarded in Olympic qualifying classes in dressage -- and with numerous big-time awards to my credit).
You get there, wherever "there" is, (Carnagie Hall, for instance) by PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE! So go find a workshop near you to get you jumpstarted. Then write a certain amount of words each day (in the high three figures is a good place to start, but even five words a day, if they're the RIGHT words, is a good start - I usually aim for 2500 words a day, not that I always hit the mark if I need to do much editing to what I wrote before. I usually review the previous day's work before moving on, but you have to do whatever works for you).
Join the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) to kick you off - 50,000 words in a month, no editing allowed (as far as I know) just straight writing. You write a novel from beginning to end, good or not, in 30 days. I'm gonna have to do it in 21 days, since I'll be on a business trip ten days of the month (I can write while my hubby drives the truck three of the days we're gone). Go to nanowrimo.com and sign up for the notifications, which should go out tomorrow, I think (Oct. 1). This will be my first try at it, but I wrote a 115,000 word original novel with a lot of edits between Dec. 12, 2005 and March 21, 2006 - I'm shopping it to agents now (and it's had a LOT of edits between then and now, and has been through five beta readers, too). When I decided I wanted to get back into writing two years ago, I used my love of all things Harry Potter related to create two novels (my versions of Book 6 and Book 7) to stretch my writing muscles fiction-wise. Those two novels total over a million words and got me back in the swing of fiction, as well as helping me learn what's considered "good style" in fiction these days (it changes over time, y'know). If I can do this in my mid-50's after not writing anything but PR for my art for the fifteen years before I started writing Harry Potter fanfiction, you, as a young whipper-snapper with all your mental synapses firing with youthful energy, can certainly do it! So stop whining and get on with it! Exercise those muscles! NOW!!! Good luck with it!
posted
PS to my post: To get you started, why not try the "flash fiction" challenges on this site and LibertyHallWriters.com and Notebored.com? Or subscribe to Writer's Digest and do the exercises in there as well as reading the articles. Don't write any jacket blurbs! (Unless you want to write mine, of course - I find those hard to do, but I'm working on them!!) Hope this helps!
posted
Isaac Luke, I echo what everyone else has said. Just write. Even if it's awful. Put it on paper and move on. That's really hard to do. The urge to revise, to erase the garbage, is strong. It took me a LONG time to fight off that urge.
Permit me to quote directly from the writing journal I keep while writing my novel (a habit I picked up from Steinbeck). This is from when I finally won the fight against the urge to revise:
quote:Once you are able to let yourself type crap and not edit it, your whole life changes.
I have typed a lot of crap in the last few days. And, with the exception of the most horrendously crappy crap, I have left it. And I don’t care. Why? Because it’s right. I’m in the right place, I can just write and move on.
I'll tell you, that was such an incredibly awesome feeling, I can't describe it.
The "X words per day" method doesn't work for me. I end up discouraged when I fall short of the target number every day. Instead, I use a similar method: I must complete a scene (or part of a long scene) each day. That means either writing a new scene, or revising the previous day's scene. I only allow myself one shot at revising a scene before it no longer counts as the day's "assignment". After that, I can still revise if I want, but it doesn't count as the required scene. And I'm only allowed to revise completed scenes, not partial ones.
Sometimes, the time comes to write, and I draw a blank. That's fine. I stare at it for a while, then go do something else. But I only allow myself to skip one day, never two in a row. The second day, I have to write something, even if I know it will get thrown out.
Maybe that method will work for you, maybe not. But it's an idea. Good luck!
posted
When you are trying to become a professional, remember that your work must hold it's own against people like OSC, Ben Bova, Kelly Link, Jay Lake, and on and on and on. It isn't good enough to be good, you have to be great. That's a very sobering realization, but one you have to make before you can take the steps necessary to get into that club.
Your idea's haven't degraded, your expectations have inflated.
posted
One other thing to keep in mind. Yes, you might have talent. Yes, everything you do might come easy to you. Does this get you off the hook as far as how much work writing is? Newp. I know from personal experience. I was just like you; teachers raved about me, I wrote stories and ideas down on paper as soon as my chubby little fingers could clutch a crayon. I won contests with ease and usually with rough drafts; after all, why bother revising when your first drafts were enough better than everyone else's polished work to win? I too was lazy and loving it.
Then real life descended. I woke up one morning and realized it was my 25th birthday. Here I was, halfway through my twenties and absolutely confident about my writing ability. What did I have to show for it? Abso-friggin-lutely nothing. Had I actually written the novel I'd been bragging about to friends and family since I was 13? No. Had I actually finished any of the myriad stories I'd started in hundreds of spiral notebooks over the years? No. Had I, in fact, done anything of actual merit? No.
Uh oh.
I joined Hatrack. I joined NaNoWriMo. I joined Liberty Hall. I began to spend hours every single day learning the craft of writing. I remember clearly the feeling of joy I got when I actually finished writing my first story. And I remember the despair when I realized how much worse that story was than things written by my favorite authors.
I'd like to say one thing about the realization that you suck: it takes a little bit of knowledge to get to that point. You know how they say ignorance is bliss? This is true. Before you've learned a certain amount about the craft, it's impossible to realize how hard it is and how much work. Once you get to the place where you are aware of how much you don't yet know, that's when the depression sits in. So what do you do? Do you just give up? Well, sure. If that's your decision. I couldn't. I'd lived too long with the dream, cared too much about my stories, to do that.
So I began to work in earnest. I wrote 40k in that first NaNoWriMo, then realized I needed to learn a lot more about how to write novels before I could do it right. Trashed that 40k. Spent the next two years honing my writing skills with short stories, joining critique groups, reading every book and article on writing and craft I could get my hands on.
Now, I'm 27. In some ways those two years have seemed an eternity. In others, the blink of an eye. I'm now deeply into the much better version of my novel, finally able to actually put what I want to on the page. I don't have any illusions this time. I know that this is a rough draft, and will need revision. But I also know enough to know that I'm on the right track; I'm doing the right thing. Has it been easy? Heck no. Has it been worth it? You bet.
posted
It seems to me that when a writer realizes their writing is, as sojoyful so eloquently put it, "horrendously crappy crap," it means they are a notch higher on the post than many beginning writers. I see a lot of beginning writers who don't even realize their stuff is awful (and resent being told there is room for improvement). But, spend enough time in workshops, writers forums, and most importantly, critiquing for others and you begin to pick out what determines good writing from bad. It's a lot easier to catch the joy of writing if you have a sense that you are on the right path, even if you aren't too sure where you are going to end up.
A mediocre writer with perseverance stands a far better chance to be published than a gifted writer who is too timid to commit to some serious BIC (Butt-In-Chair) time at the keyboard.
Write. There is no other way to be a writer. Just write.
Oh, and Lynda? I've looked at your website. You have some serious talent, girlfriend. You didn't list your URL, but I'm not so shy: http://www.thesculptedhorse.com.
Awesome stuff. Check it out. This is the difference between having a natural talent, or having a natural talent AND training.
[This message has been edited by Elan (edited September 30, 2006).]
posted
I've reflected on this kind of problem myself. Here's a ramble in response to your ramble.
If school is easy, we don't learn strategies for dealing with complexity. Then we get older and have to deal with naturally becoming slower on the uptake, as well. We find we must consult a high school drop-out to learn how to learn the hard way.
Define the problem as clearly as possible. You use the words "good" and "terrible" without being specific about what that means in this context. For me, good is coherent, and terrible is anything else. Erudition is merely a fuzzy target.
What else have you been doing and reading and thinking about, other than your writing? Is something subliminally giving you rules or guidelines or thought patterns that interfere? After years of programming, I could no longer spell reliably, but I was better able to visualize.
Somewhere I came across the claim that writer's block ultimately comes from not writing what we really want to write. Seems to me that writing unusually badly could sometimes have a similar origin.
Those early stories: were they really that good? Or are you just remembering the enthusiasm and concluding it was justified? I don't have that problem, really, since I've never written good fiction (except for that metaphysics paper, read in class for laughs, graded “D,” that became the stuff of legend, even before the teacher was canned . . . ah, those were the days!)
Have there been mutations in your motivation or perceived audience? When I feel no hope of being heard in the way I need to speak, I become mute. Or I just continue talking to myself, as usual, inventing the audience as I go!
quote:Quite simply, I never had to work for it at all.
Quite simply, since you never had to work for it, you never learned the craft.
The answer is to write. Keep writing, then write some more. Do it as and how it makes sense for you and don't be afraid to change up how and when you do it. Just do it.
posted
Well, I had a long thin time (roughly about five years), where the work came slowly-if-at-all, break open last month and spill out nearly fifty thousand words of a novel in just a month and a half. (Probably be past that point now if I hadn't'a gotten sick these past few days.)
Two months ago I might've said something along the lines of "your writing has shifted: instead of going for the first idea you're looking for the best idea." That's what I took to have happened to me. But now, I'm not so sure...
posted
Wow, Elan, thanks a lot! I didn't think putting an art URL in my signature was appropriate here, but I did on Notebored, because I'm critting art there as well as writing. I'll add it here too, since I'm "out of the closet" (so to speak) now. ;-) Glad you liked it.
And back to the art-compared-to-writing thingie - I LOVE my pieces when I send them off to the foundry. I LOVE my pieces when I first get them back from the foundry. After I live with them a while, I see the flaw I wish I'd caught when the piece was still in clay. You learn by doing. With art, you learn to hold the piece up to a mirror so you can see it with different eyes, or if it's a painting to look at it upside down, in front of a mirror, or both. These changes in perspective help you find the flaws. I haven't worked out how to look at my writing upside-down or in a mirror yet, so I just set it aside when I think it's "finished" and then read it again a month or more later. THEN I see things that could be improved. If anyone knows a better "mirror" or "upside-down" method for writing, I'd love to hear it. In the meantime, I'm spending lots of BIC time (butt-in-chair - great term!) working on improving my writing.
posted
You might try doing Body for Life and then fall off it so you understand what we mean when we say that writing is like building muscles and letting them atrophy. Because there was a time in my life I wouldn't have even understood what that meant.
Of course, there are some things I work at for a while, and then I take a break, and when I go back to them I'm better somehow. This happened with being able to read music, and also with a rather silly videogame that I'm ashamed to mention. I don't think it would happen with writing overall, but it could happen in some of the mechanical areas like picking up grammar errors.
I have some very nice Giuseppe Aramani horses in my office including one of his early horse family sculpture. The proportions of the horse family are all wrong, etc. Everyone who walks in asks if those horses are "starving to death." Or why the mare is sniffing the butt of her foal. But I like the peice because it shows how he progressed from that work to "The Stallions" peice I have next to it.
What is true for sculpting is true for writing. Even the best writers had to learn and practice to find their voice.
Learning is the most painful when you are re-learning something you thought you knew. Don't give up.
posted
Like you, when I was younger I was bursting with ideas... not many of which came to fruition. I also struggled with the internal belief that I might be facing some deterioration as I grew older and the ideas seemed to flow less and less with each passing year.
However, unlike most here, I don't really attribute the phenomenon to writing muscles that aren't being used so much as to an internal editor that recognizes with greater and greater precision that many of those ideas that you once believed were great simply aren't very good. If this sounds mean, it's not meant to. I am no denigrating anyone's ideas, but as a thinking animal, especially a creative thinking animal, you are barraged with literally thousands of potential story ideas on a daily basis.
As a professional, it is up to you to sift through those ideas that have the potential to become truly engaging stories and those ideas that are rehashes of other peoples stories... or even worse have the potential to become boring stories or even awful stories.
And as a professional, as your internal editor grows, you will instantly arrive at the conclusion that an editor is quite unlikely to pick up 'Sex Slaves of the Planet Xenon' in this day and age, whereas one might be more likely to pick up 'The Final Gate.'
As a writer, ultimately there will be a terminal amount of 'things' you can write over the course of your career. Your internal editor is a valuable tool in this regard, because it will keep you from wasting time writing things that aren't very good and allow you, hopefully, to spend your finite time writing things that are.
posted
"I could not believe the words appearing on the page had come from me."
What an interesting sentence. Perhaps they didn't come from you, but from outside, osmotically. What class in particular were you writing for? How foreign is it, and in what ways, compared to your usual areas of thought?
We know that what we read or hear influences us, but we might not immediately notice how the influence extends to our grammar and vocabulary.
posted
Kings_Falcon, thanks a lot! As for your Armani horses - it's interesting that I've always thought ALL of his horses were strangly conformed - their legs aren't the right proportions (I'll get this back to writing in a minute) - the lower leg, that straight bone (called the "cannon bone") is far too long for "normal" horses. Imagine my surprise when we visited Italy in 2001 and saw that the horses pulling the carriages near the Colusseum (sp?) were built EXACTLY like that, with the two halves of their legs nearly equal in length, rather than the top part being much longer. (A short cannon bone is preferred in performance horses because it's stronger and less likely to get injured.)
All that said, art and writing are both "perceptive" things (dunno if I'm saying that the right way) - the "art" is in the eye of the beholder. Those of us who know performance horses look at Armani horses and wonder if he's ever seen a real, live horse. Those who live in Italy look at his horses and see the horses they see all the time in the streets of Rome. It's a matter of perception, and most of the time, we can't see our own creations as clearly as other people can, so we either think they're fabulous (when they aren't, not yet anyway) or lousy (which they may not be, either!). We need an emtional "distance" from our work, just as I need to look at mys culptures in a mirror, to see them properly.
When we're "young" at writing, whatever our chronological ages, we see our writing as either FABULOUS or horrible, as I said above, depending on our mood and how self-critical we are. One of the hardest things in the world to learn is to stand back and appraise your own creative work dispassionately. Many actors who are FANTASTIC can't stand to see themselves on screen. Many make it a point to never watch their films. If they go to premieres, they cover their eyes and just listen to the reactions of the crowd. Many artists will go to their show openings (when they're lucky enough to get into shows) and stand hopefully by their art, hoping to hear someone say something wonderful about it - or else they hide in the corner eating hors d'oevres and trying to disappear into the wallpaper.
As writers, we start out all gung ho, excited about the stories pouring out of our fingers, but then DOUBT jumps in and makes us think, "I can't make this into a complete story! Nobody would buy it even if I could!" and then that story "start" gets set aside. "Stick-to-it-tiveness" (as my mother used to say) is a difficult character trait to develop. But the rewards are worth all the blood, sweat and tears when we fight a creative project to a satisfactory finish (and learn to recognize when it's done so we don't "overpaint" or "overwrite" and ruin a good creation). I'm there with the art. Still working on it with the writing, although my writing pleases ME now - now all I have to do is find an agent and publisher who like it!
Lynda, the optimist!
[This message has been edited by Lynda (edited October 03, 2006).]
I go back and look at some of the stuff I wrote in high school when the words just jumped onto the page. Guess what? It's absolute crap. The ideas were there but the execution needed help. I never saw it back then either. Sure there were flashes of stuff that was good but that's all they were - flashes. In my spare time - hee hee, what spare time, I still have two crits to return? - I may pick those high school stories up again and see if they can be made into something workable. It could be fun. Not.
posted
Kings_Falcon, I wrote a story in ninth grade that got an "A" but didn't get into the school's literary magazine (it was too silly for a "literary magazine"). That story still haunts me - it was SUCH a fun thing to write and I still think the story is a kick. I'm toying with the idea of writing it for NaNoWriMo, but don't know that it has 50,000 words in it. Maybe it will if I go more into the girl's background and life rather than just the "event" that made the story such fun for me. Who knows? Some of those ideas from 40+ years ago might just be winners - or not! ;-)
posted
Sure your a little rusty, but I think the problem here is that you are writing a stupid paper for school. It's closed and controlled, and it isn't just an exercise of joy. (oh I miss those days) Try to write a story, just for the hallibut. (liberty hall is a great place to do that.) The fact that you are here shows me that you care so you should be fine, but from this point on writing is work. (best work in the world though.)
Posts: 1895 | Registered: Mar 2004
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
The only differences is that I was actually a pretty good writer in high school - aced the AP English tests (including a full 5 on the Lit exam), actually tested out of my required English courses in college and will soon enter the working world as a professional technical writer & editor - and still, even then, my writing, especially my creative writing feels rather subpar. I've been struggling over trying to perfect the good "hook" for my fragments, not to mention all the other areas I'm weak in such as dialogue, and it's all driving me crazy. I've recently began wondering if my story ideas or my "creative style" for lack of a better term is actually better suited towards another medium such as motion picture rather than the written word (see previous thread on that subject). I just don't know what to effin' do anymore.
Good luck with it!
