Tuesday, March 13, 2012

Writing: When the Muse Strikes




First–go read this post on Periphery. Then come back. Thanks again, Tangled Lou, for making my brain work this morning. What are the nuts and bolts of my writing and editing process? How do I write? How much do I edit? What kind of writer am I?

I write because it is in my schedule to write, generally, not because the muse strikes. This is because I am the mother of three, I guess. When the muse strikes, her ass has to wait until there's a free moment. I do remember what she was talking about though. Sometimes I even scribble down notes.

I compose in Blogger. I'm so used to it that I compose in Blogger even when it isn't for my blog, which is dumb. It's like my blog owns ALL my writing. I should probably stop doing that, if I am going to start submitting work for actual pay, huh?

I have no pre-formed outline in my head, or anywhere else, when I sit down to write, although I usually have a general notion, more like a prompt than anything more specific. I grab onto that idea, usually without any real sense where I want to go with it exactly and start writing. I get quiet and listen for the right word. I keep a thesaurus tab open all the time on my browser, to help me recollect the perfect word I am trying to remember, or sometimes replace a word that just sounds wrong in the sentence.

I edit as I go. I get several paragraphs in, having corrected all the spelling and grammar mistakes I find as I write, and start re-reading it to myself. I do this every time I hit a pause and am not sure where to go next. When I re-read, I can hear both what is wrong with what I wrote and what I need to write next. By "what is wrong" I mean a lot of things: the rhythm of a sentence and paragraph, the harmony of words sharing that space together, the consistency of tone. Does the sentence ramble or sound too bare? When does a colorful word add depth and when does it sound overworked, pompous?

Unless I am greatly pressed for time, I re-read and edit like this and then go over the finished product in preview mode up to 10-15 times, each time catching new errors or clunky turns of phrase. I catch the most errors when I read aloud. An average post takes me two to three hours to write because of this. After I post it, my 14 year old invariably says "Did you mean 'on' here, not 'of? etc., etc. anyway." This is why a professional editor would not go amiss.

I scrap heaps of writing. I have learned to be totally unattached to my work until it feels finished. I have spent up to an hour working on a post, realized it sucks lemons, and consigned it to the scrap heap, images, edits and all. I have a graveyard of unfinished posts or posts I started just to remind myself I want to write about that. I rarely get back to the former.

My mom is a writer and, growing up around writers, I learned to be unafraid to toss any amount of writing that didn't serve what I was after. I used to get very upset, when I was younger, and Mom would say "This paragraph doesn't work." A whole paragraph was like a child to me. Now I toss paragraphs on the midden heap with nary a backward glance. Most of this post has been about editing because that is most of what my writing time is consumed with. So there you have it.

The most interesting question TL asks is this:  Does your brain shut down when you write? Or are your senses alive? I am totally alive when I write. Writing is a long racing slog to the top of a mountain, my body coursing with endorphins. The voice of the sentence that wants to be expressed becoming the true thought that appears in text makes me feel like a prophet. I have total faith that if I can hear well enough, I can write.

Tangled Lou has a great dialogue going in the comments of her post on this topic, which I linked above. You should check that out and join in. I have a number of readers who are not writers, but are photographers, musicians, actors, computer programmers, and otherwise talented human beings. What I am curious about is "the zone." Do you do you art, music, etc. in a state of grace? Are you fully alive when you are doing it, and is this why you do it, because you have to? Or is it just for fun? Some of you say you are "not commenters," but I want to hear from you!

However, before you answer–would you please, if so inclined vote for me as one of Circle of Moms Top 25 Funny Moms? I have a garish pink button on the top of my blog. Simply click it and it will whisk you magically away to a web page where my blog is buried way the Hell down near the bottom. You can vote once a day until March 21, 2012. You should not spend all day voting over and over, as much as you might like to, because that would be against the rules. You are encouraged to return every day, say, after your breakfast cereal and vote again. You will be doing this purely to cheer me up. It is essentially meaningless. But, so are birthdays and we all keep right on celebrating them anyway, right? It will make me happy.

Think of it as a pony that you can give me for free.

15 comments:

  1. You've got the editing practice down. Interesting to hear how another writer writes. A lot of that rings true to my pown practices. and no I cant write when the muse strikes, with kids of my own. Now that I have an ipad I do all my writing on that, save it to Word then upload it to blogger on my computer. I like to have all my posts in Word so one of these days, as I consider them finished pieces (I edit my posts as I would my novels when I was on deadline), I plan to actually print them out.

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    1. I am too stupid to convert things from Blogger to Word and Word to Blogger. Something is always getting effed up. I think that's why I resist this. I guess I should save my posts to Word though...You are absolutely right to do so.

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    2. *You* are not the stupid here. Word is. Word adds all kinds of extra formatting tags and so forth that just totally smurf the whole thing up. For this reason, while I often compose in Word (word count for prompts), I will copy and paste into Blogger's HTML view, versus the Compose view. If I paste it in Compose, it brings all that taggy crap with it. DAMNYOUWORD! Lemme copy *just* the text, k? Pff.

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  2. Scary how much I relate to this. The "Blogger owning ALL my writing" bit especially.
    Everywhere else simply feels wrong. I have to feel all comfy and in the writing zone which is only brought on by the white and orange familiar Blogger layout. Psychological, crazy, call it whatever, but I have it. The Thesaurus tab too. (<--Alliteration!) The preview button is clicked at least twice, and still, I have to edit after it being posted and hope that someone hasn't already read it.
    Loved seeing how your writing process goes.

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    1. Yay! Glad to have company. Reading the comments on Periphery, I feel rather uptight by contrast to everyone else. Perhaps I just have cruddier raw material, since I spend so much time fixing it up. :) I like to think of it as "perfecting" it, but how perfect can it be if my eighth grade keeps correcting it?

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    2. Did you mean to say "my eighth gradeR keeps correcting it?"

      Oh, that was my inner 8th grader coming out. Sorry! :-)

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  3. I think I may be nearly your writing opposite. I really enjoy reading about how other people write, but hate writing about how I write, so I'll be more of a spectator in this exercise!

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    1. Your writing seems so polished and you always know exactly where you are headed, firmly in the driver's seat of each post. I am sort of sitting in the passenger's seat, trying to steer drunkenly while we veer off a cliff, by contrast. :)

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    2. I'm with you on this, Tara. So bummed that Kelly is sitting this one out. I understand not liking writing about writing. It's kind of like writing about how you breathe. I was hoping she would share some of her magic mojo with us, though.

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  4. "Writing is a long racing slog to the top of a mountain, my body coursing with endorphins." Doesn't matter how you do it, you do it so well. That next line really got me, too. Thanks for sharing your process.

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  5. I really relate to the 14 year old editor. My daughter asks me the same things! I should just let her read my post before I hit publish (since she is usually standing at my shoulder anyway) but I never do. I wait until it's out there for the whole world to see I used staples when I meant stables!

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  6. You sound a bit like me. I sometimes feel like I'm actually two people, this really creative / deep / thoughtful spill all the words on the page guy, and then I turn into this picky / editty (?word) / make everything just right fixit guy. I spend most of my time repairing what creative guy writes.

    It's fun to read about how someone else writes. Thanks for this. If you are interested here is a piece I wrote about my writing process: http://everyonelisten.com/2011/11/03/campfire-smoke-and-drifting-thoughts/

    -Bob

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  7. This is all fascinating to me. I'm summoning up the wherewithal to document how I write. We'll see when it shows up. OH, and this: "When the muse strikes, her ass has to wait until there's a free moment" made me snort.

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  8. I'm glad I'm not the only one spending absurd amounts of time on substantial (and even sometimes insubstantial) posts. Part of why I have fallen so far behind in reading the blogs I love is because I have spent so much of this past week tinkering with posts about my own writing.

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Faith in Ambiguity by Tara Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License