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I've come to the very painful realization that I write a lot better when I'm writing slower.
This isn't just an issue of prose, although it's really intimidating to come back and try to clean up bad prose, and I was a lot happier when I had no idea how badly I was writing. Mostly it's an issue of structure, and the things that I'm doing below the surface where I can't notice them. If I'm writing 1500 words a day or so, it's because I'm blithely charging on without any more basis than "It would be cool if THIS happened." Writing slowly gives my brain some time to catch up with my plot, so that I can figure out what needs to go in the story structurally and symbolically.
I could tell you why it is Very Important that the characters in Ninja Death Squad are doing a musical about ninjas rather than pirates or monkeys. But I couldn't have told you that until the fourth draft.
Writing a novel feels a lot like having 2000 puzzle pieces on the floor, and 300 of them go together to make a puzzle, and I don't need the other 1700, but I can storm forward and mash pieces together any way I can sort of make them fit, or I can go slowly and make sure that each piece is the right piece. Except that this is still new to me, and I'm not at all sure that I will get the pieces in the right spots no matter how slowly I go!
I guess that I'm anxious in no small part because I have no idea what I was doing right with Ninja Death Squad that I wasn't doing right with the fiveish novels I wrote before that. That's a weird kind of feeling. It's almost like the way I used to panic before major school assignments because this professor would be the one to realize I wasn't nearly as smart as everyone else thought I was. It would be really nice if I didn't have that any more.
This isn't just an issue of prose, although it's really intimidating to come back and try to clean up bad prose, and I was a lot happier when I had no idea how badly I was writing. Mostly it's an issue of structure, and the things that I'm doing below the surface where I can't notice them. If I'm writing 1500 words a day or so, it's because I'm blithely charging on without any more basis than "It would be cool if THIS happened." Writing slowly gives my brain some time to catch up with my plot, so that I can figure out what needs to go in the story structurally and symbolically.
I could tell you why it is Very Important that the characters in Ninja Death Squad are doing a musical about ninjas rather than pirates or monkeys. But I couldn't have told you that until the fourth draft.
Writing a novel feels a lot like having 2000 puzzle pieces on the floor, and 300 of them go together to make a puzzle, and I don't need the other 1700, but I can storm forward and mash pieces together any way I can sort of make them fit, or I can go slowly and make sure that each piece is the right piece. Except that this is still new to me, and I'm not at all sure that I will get the pieces in the right spots no matter how slowly I go!
I guess that I'm anxious in no small part because I have no idea what I was doing right with Ninja Death Squad that I wasn't doing right with the fiveish novels I wrote before that. That's a weird kind of feeling. It's almost like the way I used to panic before major school assignments because this professor would be the one to realize I wasn't nearly as smart as everyone else thought I was. It would be really nice if I didn't have that any more.