{"id":6175,"date":"2011-10-05T11:16:53","date_gmt":"2011-10-05T17:16:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=6175"},"modified":"2011-10-05T16:40:12","modified_gmt":"2011-10-05T22:40:12","slug":"what-was-your-purpose-in-writing-this","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/what-was-your-purpose-in-writing-this\/","title":{"rendered":"“What was your purpose in writing this?”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I heard back from one of my first readers for Star Wanderers,<\/em> and the feedback she gave me was awesome.\u00a0 You know you’ve got a good first reader when their comments make you go “aha!” and you find yourself with a host of new ideas for the story.<\/p>\n

Anyway, at one point, she asked me: “what was your purpose in writing this?” To which I answered “I don’t know; I was supposed to be working on something else, and all of a sudden I found that I’d written this story!”<\/p>\n

Her eyes widened a little, and she kind of got this look on her face that said: “how could you possibly write something like this and not<\/em> put a ton of thought into it?” Which struck me as amusing, because she’s an editor who writes on the side, and I’m a writer who edits on the side.<\/p>\n

This is the thing about discovery writing: it’s not about how much sweat and tears you put into your work, but how much energy you get out of it.\u00a0 If a project just totally drains you, chances are it’s not going to be as good as something so exciting that you can’t not write it.\u00a0 And once you improve your craft to the point where you’re no longer committing all the stupid new writer mistakes, if you’re having fun, chances are that the readers are going to enjoy it too.<\/p>\n

Ah, the joys of spontaneous creativity.\u00a0 Would that it was always this much fun.<\/p>\n

\ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday I heard back from one of my first readers for Star Wanderers, and the feedback she gave me was awesome.\u00a0 You know you’ve got a good first reader when their comments make you go “aha!” and you find yourself with a host of new ideas for the story. Anyway, at one point, she asked… Continue reading “What was your purpose in writing this?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[857],"tags":[192,634,122,210,232,633],"class_list":["post-6175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sw","tag-discovery-writing","tag-first-writers","tag-friends","tag-the-leading-edge","tag-why-we-write","tag-writers-vs-editors","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-1BB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6175"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6182,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6175\/revisions\/6182"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}