{"id":8733,"date":"2013-07-11T23:44:23","date_gmt":"2013-07-12T05:44:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=8733"},"modified":"2013-07-11T23:46:47","modified_gmt":"2013-07-12T05:46:47","slug":"when-something-youve-written-moves-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/when-something-youve-written-moves-you\/","title":{"rendered":"When something you’ve written moves you"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SW-VISo I had an interesting experience today as I was revising Star Wanderers: Benefactor (Part VI)<\/strong>,<\/strong> and I’m not sure how to describe it without sounding like “that guy” who gushes far too much about his books.\u00a0 At the risk of being “that guy,” here goes.<\/p>\n

As writers, it’s far too easy for us to write something in the heat of a creative passion, only to dismiss it later.\u00a0 Perhaps we’re so afraid of screwing up that we yearn to fall back on the story that’s safe rather than the story that rings true, or perhaps we realize just how much of ourselves we’ve put into it that it scares us to death that someone might actually read it.\u00a0 Too often, something else that’s broken about the story distracts us from the stuff that’s actually good, so we end up throwing it all out together.\u00a0 Our critical minds work so differently from our creative ones that when the fires of creative passion turn to smoldering embers, it’s not unusual to feel like we’ve been left completely naked and need to scramble desperately to cover ourselves.<\/p>\n

For that reason, I’ve made myself a rule not to revise a story without first making a set of bullet points, chapter by scene, of what I’m going to do.\u00a0 My critical mind has full domain of that list of bullet points, but I will not let him carve up my story.\u00a0 The list contains a series of instructions for my creative mind, who can actually revise quite well when given a little direction.\u00a0 But when he thinks that the direction is wrong, he’s not afraid to push back.<\/p>\n

The revision notes for my books always read like a back-and-forth argument between my critical and creative minds.\u00a0 Once I’m finished writing up the bullet point list of revisions, I turn on track changes and cross them off one by one as I complete them.\u00a0 But whenever I get to a point where my creative mind disagrees, I’ll cross it off and write down the reasons why it’s better to go in a different direction.\u00a0 Some of the more recent notes for Benefactor<\/strong> include:<\/p>\n

It’s not as much of an issue as you think.<\/p>\n

Eh, the dialog works pretty well.<\/p>\n

Already there.\u00a0 Better to keep it subtle.<\/p>\n

Why?\u00a0 This is good.<\/p>\n

No, it works very well with what’s already here.\u00a0 Don’t change it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So with that as a preface, I got to a scene in Benefactor<\/strong> today where one of the characters has a major life crisis upon learning that his wife is pregnant.\u00a0 The pregnancy catches him completely by surprise, and makes him wake up and wonder if his life is really heading in the direction that he wants.\u00a0 He feels like he’s stumbling into his future blindly, tripping over his feet without knowing where he’s going, and that frightens him.<\/p>\n

I’d made some notes to add some stuff for clarification at the end of the scene, but I must have only been skimming it when I made the revision notes because all of that stuff was already there, and expressed more poignantly than I think I could have done.\u00a0 Basically, the character comes to peace with the life he’s giving up by realizing that he will one day lead his son to follow in his footsteps, just as his own father did with him.<\/p>\n

My critical mind completely missed that, because he was only looking for problems that needed to be fixed.\u00a0 But when I read it again today, I was actually kind of shocked that this was something I’d written.\u00a0 I don’t want to say that it’s the best thing that’s ever been written, because certainly I have lots of room for improvement, but the passage really moved me, and I wasn’t expecting that.<\/p>\n

So yeah, revisions for Star Wanderers: Benefactor (Part VI)<\/strong> are coming along swimmingly.\u00a0 It might be a bit tough to get the final draft proofread in time for a July release, but I’ve got some friends who might be able to help.\u00a0 Just like I don’t trust my critical mind to meddle with the story, I don’t trust my eyeballs to catch all the typos and grammatical errors.\u00a0 But I think that the substantive revisions will be finished by Tuesday, and after that, it’s time to get the publishing wheels grinding.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, I was playing around with The Gimp today, and I came up with a cover for Star Wanderers: Reproach (Part VII).<\/strong>\u00a0 Check it out!<\/p>\n

\"SW-VII The image is the Orion Nebula, as imaged by the Spitzer Space Telescope.\u00a0 You can find the original here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I thought it was fitting, considering how Reproach<\/strong> is a parallel novella to Sacrifice,<\/strong> and Sacrifice<\/strong> also features an image of the Orion Nebula on the cover.\u00a0 But the important thing is just that it looks cool and is sufficiently eye-catching.<\/p>\n

So that’s about it.\u00a0 I’ve got a lot of heavy revisions to do tomorrow, but even my critical mind agrees that chapters 4 and 5 are actually pretty good.\u00a0 There’s at least one scene missing and a couple of other things that need to be added, but I’m actually looking forward to writing those.\u00a0 Also, a couple of characters need some more fleshing out, but that shouldn’t be too difficult.\u00a0 The Tuesday deadline is quite doable.<\/p>\n

Have a good night, and thanks as always for reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So I had an interesting experience today as I was revising Star Wanderers: Benefactor (Part VI), and I’m not sure how to describe it without sounding like “that guy” who gushes far too much about his books.\u00a0 At the risk of being “that guy,” here goes. As writers, it’s far too easy for us to… Continue reading When something you’ve written moves you<\/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":"Thoughts on revision, creative mind vs. critical mind, and what it's like when your own writing moves you.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[857],"tags":[371,252,671,156,599,232],"class_list":["post-8733","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sw","tag-creative-process","tag-criticism","tag-ebook-covers","tag-revising","tag-thoughts-reflections","tag-why-we-write","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2gR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8733","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=8733"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8733\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8740,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8733\/revisions\/8740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}