Writing: A Progression

I couldn't decide what I wanted to write about in this initial post, and honestly, I'm writing this about fifteen minutes before it's due to hit the blog because I'm that much of a procrastinator when I don't have any idea what to go on.

But, I figured I might as well just share an overall philosophy on writing. Now, I don't have any fancy quotes from Dr. Suess, or Jane Eyre for you. Just a raw philosophy that I've come up with over the last few years since I started this process of writing.

When you start out writing, you have little to no direction. Or at least, I didn't. I just had an idea. Granted, it was an idea about teens with superpowers getting chased by a non-descript government unit for really nothing more than the sake of having action in the story, but it was an idea. And so I wrote it. I had no idea of whether or not I started in the right or wrong place, and I had little to no idea where it should end either. I just stopped when I got bored, or there grew to be "too many words". (Which at the time lent itself to mean anything over 60,000--and that idea has been tossed for a long while.)

However, there's something about doing that--writing for yourself and throwing caution to the wind that has a sort of artistic beauty.

Now, everyone says that your first project is going to be a bunch of shit. We've all heard it. And if you haven't, get used to seeing the phrase and understanding that when people say no one's going to want to buy your first idea, they're probably right.

But no one tells you that your sixth or seventh or thirtieth idea might be shit. No one tells you that it doesn't immediately get better, that writing is not an instantaneous gratification. There is no "submit" button at the end of a Word Document to magically turn your word-vomit of a draft into a brilliant slice of literature.

No, that takes practice.

Malcolm Gladwell refers to the 10,000-hour rule: where it takes 10,000 hours of solid practice, nearly a year and two months of non-stop practice to master something.

Sometimes I'd like to think I've logged all those hours with the written word in the last six years. But there are days where I doubt it.

Others say that you have to log over a million words before you find your "voice". Well, I don't believe that one either because voices change. All the time. We switch from personality to personality, character to character as we grow as writers. My first cast wouldn't be the same if I rewrote them today, and I'm not sure I want to try. I don't want to take away the raw voice they had originally. Because it was part of a learning process.

So over the years, and over numerous waves of this "Artist" or "Creative's" condition where nothing is ever good enough, or I feel like I'm getting nowhere at all no matter how many hours I spend or how many words I log, I've learned something: writing is a process.

It's not something you can quite pin down and replicate over and over again. Not if you want to be good. Mediocre, sure. There are recycled stories everywhere. But if you want to be really good at what you do--J.K. Rowling and C. S. Lewis good--you're going to have to work at it.

Because the first idea isn't going to be the one that sells millions and millions of copies. I wonder sometimes how many drafts Rowling went through before she ended up with something that even remotely resembled today's Harry Potter. I'd like to think that number is large--because if it isn't that's just more evidence that she's secretly from the future and there's been a ripple in the time stream continuum.

But that's also the beauty of writing. Is that you have the capability to keep writing. Even if it's the same concept over and over again, the same core ideas or main themes that somehow end up finding their way into your work, you can continuously go back to it, revise it, explore the words you built all over again. And thought it's frustrating to hear "no" or "fix this" or "I wish there was more of..." when you're damned sure you got it right this time around, you can still change things.

And that, I guess is what I love about writing. Is that nothing's ever truly finished. It's a growing thing, a living work. My characters--even the abandoned ones--are never forgotten. There's not a day where I don't draw from my experiences with past shots, and I guess that's my philosophy when it comes to my work:

I write because I know I'm in control, and that I can go back and fix the problems I might not see today some other time. I write because I have a story and a point I'd like to get across, an emotion that needs to come out. I write because the books at Barnes and Noble simply aren't interesting anymore. They're not complex enough for me, so I give it a shot for myself. I write because on a blank sheet of paper anything can happen, and I can make anything not happen. I get to play god for a little while, and sometimes, that's nice.

Writing is a tool to get away from the world, to share something with others, and it really shouldn't be about anything more than that.