I’m thinking …
I’ve had several emails and comments about yesterday’s posting – some people agreeing, others wondering how the hell you stop yourself becoming a compulsive ‘polisher’. I know why I think it’s a bad idea for writers to spend so little time writing and so much time editing, revising and polishing, but I’m not sure I’ve formulated that knowledge enough to put it into words.
Mostly it comes from a visceral sense that the writers I know who write a lot, are happier than those who don’t. And that seems to be based in some feeling in them, that the best is still ahead, often in the story they’re currently writing – whereas for the ‘polishers’ there seems to be a sense that the best is hidden in what they already have, but perhaps they can’t quite get others to see it.
Partly though, it comes from my years spent trying to convey complex ideas (like climate change) to often unreceptive audiences. What I discovered – and it will be no surprise – is that people do better when they are inside the idea. If I tried to persuade people of the value of reducing fossil fuel use, they would switch off. But if I gave them facts about changing petrol prices and how that affected a travelling teacher who had to drive sixty miles a day to teach basic literacy to little children, and then asked them to write a letter for her, explaining to car manufacturers why they should produce a solar-powered car, boy did they get into it!
Writing is the experience of becoming the travelling teacher. Editing is the process of persuading people by use of facts.
Writing is immersive. We are ‘being’ writers. We are inside our craft, using our talent to power us through an everchanging landscape. It may be knackering but it’s also new and stimulating.
Revising is extractive. We are ‘doing’ editing. We look at our work from all angles and take away a bit here and a bit there until it is stronger and better balanced. It is exhausting but in addition it’s a constant re-treading of an old path and it can become depressing.
I’m going to think about this some more. I need to understand why my gut feeling about this is so strong and whether it can be expressed simply enough to others. Equally, I need to explore why something that seems so important and so obvious to me, doesn’t seem to be much of a feature of most courses that teach fiction.
2 Comments
Tribeless
13th September 2006Very quickly, here’s my opinion, and, in a sense, counter argument 🙂
As a writer I certainly ‘feel’ better when I’m writing, not revising, because writing is the artistic act of creation, and it is the creative act, whether writer, painter, potter, that the artist is ‘hooked’ on. It’s the artist getting their ‘fix’, with the feelings of euphoria attendant on that.
But that only explains why I feel better when writing than when revising. After that, how much time I spend on each activity comes down to goals. I would spend as much time revising as writing, this being because my first draft of a story is always a long way off ‘my best’. Given that I have little time to write, currently, my goal is to get published in the ‘highest’ (I know, elitism) markets I can reach, so, for me, my time is as well spent polishing a story to the highest standard I can reach, as simply pushing out stories and sending them off when they do not reflect my strongest writing.
Of course, the problem is knowing when to stop polishing: which then turns back to your post, I guess.
[I always seem to make heaps of typos when posting to blogs, so sorry … although, proof of why I need to polish.]
It would be interesting to hear the ideas of others.
Cheers Mark Hubbard
Tom Saunders
14th September 2006Your argument seems to be based on the notion that editing a story is somehow ancillary to the writing of it. I don’t see the early draft of a story as the story but as the first part of the becoming of the story. Good stories, original stories, often have to be discovered or uncovered. Orthodoxies come easily to us and they are seductive, we can dust off our hands and say we’ve knocked off another piece of work and what we have is a conventional story told in a competent manner. Complex stories aren’t as simple to come by, they come from questioning, from reading what’s been written and revising, taking it further, pursuing the idea, getting all the juice and complexities of flavour from it. I can’t tell you how frequently I’ve read stories and thought, this the beginning of a great story but it isn’t finished, it’s only a washed-out version of what might have been, the writer has seen the surface of their idea, been content with it – what a waste.