The past couple of weeks have been a learning curve for me
in the best possible sense. Sometimes our good experiences come hard, and we
have to struggle mightily just to get through to the other side with something
we can look back on with pride. And sometimes, we get a break, and the learning
process can be an absolutely joyful experience.
It doesn’t happen terribly often, so relish it while you
can. Use the experience to learn something about the attitude you take with you
when you anticipate something unpleasant. I’ll admit – my attitude two weeks
ago was not nearly as confident or happy as it is today. And what was I
dreading?
Revisions.
I was starting to consider updating a short story that I
have been hanging on to for a few years now. It was the last great piece I
wrote before I really descended into what you can call “writer’s block” – perhaps
better described as “writer’s fatigue.”
When the story was new, I distributed it to family and
friends and I received so much great feedback on it that I attempted to get it
published. Be forewarned that what I am about to describe is not how you go about submitting your
work. It was a very brief attempt. I sent the story to one journal and got
rejected. It was what I had expected to happen. I had shot for the stars, just
to see if I could, and so I wasn’t all that surprised or disappointed when I
got the letter.
But for some reason I let it go at that. I got lazy,
shrugged my shoulders, and let the project fall by the wayside. I think that
deep down I knew all along that I was not satisfied with the story as it was.
First drafts are rarely the final draft. For some reason, however, I have
dreaded all my life the idea of revisions.
You can chalk that up to perfectionism, plain and simple. I
had it in my head that anything that needed to be revised wasn’t good enough in
the first place. Which is…just…wrong.
Mind-bogglingly wrong.
And I knew it was wrong, but I let myself stay scared
anyway. I was stubborn, and so I just flipped from one project to the next,
never revisiting the same work twice. Dummy.
I don’t know what changed my mind. My renewed fervor,
between this blog and my latest project, has altered my attitude on writing
significantly. All for the better. It’s a beautiful transformation, and it led
me to sit down and look at this story once again to see if it was worth sending
out for publication.
It only took me a few sentences to start cringing at the out-of-date
writing style. There was nothing inherently wrong with what I had written, or
even how I had written it. But the story was like a skeleton. It contained all
the essential pieces, but it lacked flair, taste, and was just not that
enjoyable to read (in my mind; I asked a reader to look at it again and provide
criticism, and they said they loved it just as much as they did when they first
read it; we are our own worst critics, after all).
But I was still unsatisfied, and there was no way I was
going to send it out for publication as it was. Which meant revisions.
At first I wallowed in the fear that all was lost, and oh,
how horrible, I would have to rewrite the whole thing.
After I calmed down I looked at it again and realized that I
had very little work to do after all. I started reading, updating phrases where
I thought they could be better, clarifying details, making connections that had
been left undone. I gave the story a new name (hallelujah!) and finally got
down to the business of fleshing it out, giving it shape. It’s now almost three thousand words longer,
and I’m only halfway done.
You see – revising a story does not mean you have to start
from scratch. You are building on a world you have already constructed. If
writing a story is comparable to building a house, then revising the story is
comparable to decorating it exactly the way you want it (money is no object to your
creativity).
Seeing the story grow up in such a radical way has been
delightful, not to mention confidence boosting. It showed me all along that I
had been afraid of nothing, and that my skills were not being undermined by
doing revisions, but instead bolstered and refreshed. Just like the story.
In other news, I have found a cool new toy that I have loved
using while I write called MyNoise. This website has a large list of interactive
soundscapes that you can use to practice immersive writing. For example, my
story takes place in an alien jungle, so I have been listening to the
soundscape “Jungle Noise” for two weeks. You can adjust the levels to your own
preference, or you can choose to “animate” the sliders so that the noise
constantly randomizes (which I find to be a little more realistic).
Immersive writing, ideally, is the practice of replicating
the setting of your story perfectly, but not many of us have access to alien
jungles or thirteenth century Russia, for example. Surrounding yourself in the
appropriate noises can get us close enough.
So what projects have you been putting off lately because
you were afraid of failure? Whatever they are, take a deep breath, plug in, and
get to work. Success is closer than you think.
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