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[opera142]

Okay, I'll be busy this weekend, so I wrote my 1st Quarter Goals Update a few days early. I'm planning on expanding on the Discuss My Writing In A Positive Light More Often portion next week.





Improve

This a hard one to report on, especially at 3-month intervals. It's an in-retrospect thing. Last year, I never felt like I was making huge progress. Yet looking back, I feel like I'm better now than I was then.

So instead of squinting for a light at the end of the tunnel, I just shine a spotlight two practices that have been huge helps in my quest for improvement.

1) Beta-ing: Getting it and giving it.

Using a beta is a no-brainer, and I'll spare everyone my particular Ode To A Fair Beta. But, it's amazing how much beta-ing for others has helped me with my own writing. It used to be something I avoided in the past. Not because I didn't want to help, but because I thought I couldn't offer quality help--I still suggest double-checking a story with a grammar whiz whenever I'm asked to look over a story.

While there is personal investment in beta-ing a story, it's not my story. There's a lovely distance in the activity. The whole 'it's easier to give advice than to take it' idea. Except, that I've noticed if I point out an error often enough, I start to see it to my writing. If I suggest that a writer remove a certain writing tic every time I see it, then I know that the my use of that same tic is not the Golden Exception.


2) Banishing The 3 Glumps

Glump #1: Over-writing

Man, there's joy in piling up the pages. And in the beginning over-writing is a bad habit that serves a greater purpose: getting a story from brain to text. But after the first draft, there's no reason to value quantity over quality.

Yeah, it's painful cutting away scenes-- there's so much good writing in 'em. But most over-writing isn't a case of content. It's in the way that content is presented. The thoughts in my mind and I watched him with my eyes can be shortened to I thought and I watched him without any loss of "content".

I'm sure the above has a grammatical name. I don't know it, so I call it the Impersonal-Passive. The redundancy is bad enough, but a sentence like "My eyes watched Chris's ass as he walked across the room" is also so pass-the-buck-ish. *I* didn't watch. Oh heavens No! I'm not nasty and perverted and lustful. It was my eyes doing the watching.

Own up to your writing. Don't blame it on fictional body parts. Get to your point, don't paddle around in prose-softener.


Glump #2: Under-editing

Editing is the opportunity to kick adequate writing's ass. The chance to get all up in mediocrity's grill. To snap "Bitch, please" at your first draft.

Sure, "Ran quickly" is adequate, but you ain't playing that adequate shit no more. Not when you got jogged, sprinted, and fled in your posse. And jogged, sprinted, and fled aren't there just because they're pretty. Those babies work: no one jogs in terror; a sprinter ain't in it for the long haul; fleeing implies an intolerable situation. They do the story-telling for you. "Ran" is so lazy and weak, it needed "quickly" to just to help it to the end of the sentence, and now you gotta explain to everyone why either of them were there in the first place.

Don't let those freeloaders crash in your fic.


Glump #3: Cliches.

Literary ones: emerald eyes, ice-cold wind, blazing sun. Eesh. Writing is so much more fun for the writer and reader when the writing is fresh and personal.

Fandom ones: fucked through the mattress, straining cocks, he's an addiction I can't break, the line of dialogue "Please..."

Nothing is wrong-wrong with these lines. The person who first crafted 'fucked through the mattress' deserves a spot in Fandom's Hall of Fame. The problem with them is you didn't write them, so why are they in your story? Write stuff that other -less talented writers- will want to copy.

Personal ones: I overuse lots of words: trawl, drift, collarbone, and likely a dozen others that I haven't noticed. Same goes for phrases, descriptions, plot ideas. My over-used words and etc, your over-used words and etc, writer C's over-used words and etc, ... they're fine words and etc.. But over-relying on them means a lack of thought, a lack of editing, a sort of coasting on a half a brain.

Note: This was NOT Opera Learning You On How To Be A Good Writer. Not at all. If I held the True Knowledge of Good Writing, I'd be hoarding that shit all to myself. All I'm offering is descriptions of the 3 glumps that love to mangle them some writing. No matter the genre or style.


Constructive Whining

I feel like I have such an immature style-- that my stuff reads like a 4th grader's essay on reptiles. Clumsy flow, way too basic sentence structure, and a distinct LACK of that beyond-Opera WHATEVER that makes story a story and not a series of vaguely related sentences.

Specific, Lively, and Apt has unexpectedly helped. Except that, I still struggle with expecting my specific example to elicit the same emotional response.

I hate telling my readers how to feel. My ultimate goal is craft a story that leaves them with no other option but to share my outrage or squee. But most of the time, I have no idea how to go about achieving that. I mean, I know what works for me. But I also know my way of thinking is a 180 from just about everyone else in the world's way.

If I wanted to write about an already sore wrester worrying about having to wrestle an in-ring bully, my close to final draft would end up as something like: Knowing my luck, I'll get stuck curtain-jerking with Mark Henry. To me, pow! that's specific, lively and apt. There's wrestle-vocab, Mark Henry not only conveys big bruiser, but Smackdown roster, likely squash match, and lots of slams to cover for limited wrestling skills.

But! That's how *I* interpret that sentence. Maybe a reader would take it to mean that the character is complaining more about curtain jerking than the quality of his opponent, or that the POV character isn't complaining at all-- wrestling Mark Henry to open the show is a lot better than wrestling Simon Dean on Velocity, or Mark Henry is not glumpy and careless-- he's a luscious mountain of manhood, and to the reader, the POV character isn't complaining but wondering how he'll make through a televised match without displaying a hard-on to the world.

I guess that's where betas come in. Except... I dunno.

Discuss My Writing In A Positive Light More Often

I've said this before: Sure, my writing is shitty; but it's among the least shitty writing out there. As far as wrestlefic goes, I rank myself within the top ten percent. Now, a good chunk of the reasoning behind that is I've got so little competition. On every level-- Wrestledom is teeny, tiny population-wise. It's easy to be the best out of a group of 10 or 25 or even 50.

And our teeny population has encamped itself into insular niches where repetition is not only praised but demanded, and no one is challenged. No wonder mediocrity flourishes.

But, despite the garbage around me, I'm not mediocre. I'm not good yet, but that will come. And, later on, I'll post a big, old, boring, self-patting-on-the back list of the things I love about my writing. This post is huge enough already.

Beat Last Year's Output
So far, not happening. Only 1 story, plus a joke fic. Must writewritewrite. Moremoremore.

Comments

[yesdrizella.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I've told you this, but "specific, lively, and apt" has helped me a LOT in my own writing. You're a bigger influence than you know, dude.