03-09-2009, 03:06 PM
It was Feb. 26, maybe 10 pm. I had this odd idea about fishnets, so I decided to write it up and post it.
But when I wrote it, it came out flat. Still, I'm stubborn. If I think something has promise, I'll work it longer than any sane person would.
So I worked it, and worked it. It reached two full pages, worse than ever. Every poke and prod made it worse.
I must have worked on it two or three hours. At about 1 in the morning I gave up. It was junk, and I wouldn't post it to Doom.
And I was peeved at myself for wasting the time on it. I went to bed discouraged and defeated. Because it was DOA.
The next morning I got up and started checking mail and surfing. But I have two monitors, and the left one still had the fishnet piece on it. I had no intention of revisiting it, and I kept meaning to close the file to get it off the screen. But instead I started tinkering with it. I'd do some surfing, glance over at a fishnet paragraph, and change it. And I kept doing that over a period of a couple hours.
A lot of changes involved consolidation and deletion, and for a long while I felt I was consolidating it out of existence.
But at some point there emerged a core that seemed to work and I built on that, removing all else.
What I ended up posting was one-tenth the size of the junky original -- which I still have, by the way -- and I think it's pretty decent. And I had no idea it would grow into the thread that eventually emerged.
Why am I telling you all this? I guess to make clear I don't know what I'm doing. I don't have a magic formula for writing. And a lot of efforts go absolutely nowhere. I had administered last rites to the fishnet idea only to somehow resuscitate it. And I can't give any insight into how that happened. Because lots of my failed ideas stay dead.
If this is meant as any kind of advice, I suppose it would have to do with persistence. Be persistent when tackling something you feel holds promise. Because writing is a very dodgy enterprise, full of hits and misses, and the more arrows you fire at your target, the better chance you have of eventually hitting it.
This, of course, can take a lot of time.
It also helps to do the research. Don't skimp on it. Order the $1500 doll, try it out. The cheap blow-up one too. Ignorance is no excuse for bad writing.
--cranefly
But when I wrote it, it came out flat. Still, I'm stubborn. If I think something has promise, I'll work it longer than any sane person would.
So I worked it, and worked it. It reached two full pages, worse than ever. Every poke and prod made it worse.
I must have worked on it two or three hours. At about 1 in the morning I gave up. It was junk, and I wouldn't post it to Doom.
And I was peeved at myself for wasting the time on it. I went to bed discouraged and defeated. Because it was DOA.
The next morning I got up and started checking mail and surfing. But I have two monitors, and the left one still had the fishnet piece on it. I had no intention of revisiting it, and I kept meaning to close the file to get it off the screen. But instead I started tinkering with it. I'd do some surfing, glance over at a fishnet paragraph, and change it. And I kept doing that over a period of a couple hours.
A lot of changes involved consolidation and deletion, and for a long while I felt I was consolidating it out of existence.
But at some point there emerged a core that seemed to work and I built on that, removing all else.
What I ended up posting was one-tenth the size of the junky original -- which I still have, by the way -- and I think it's pretty decent. And I had no idea it would grow into the thread that eventually emerged.
Why am I telling you all this? I guess to make clear I don't know what I'm doing. I don't have a magic formula for writing. And a lot of efforts go absolutely nowhere. I had administered last rites to the fishnet idea only to somehow resuscitate it. And I can't give any insight into how that happened. Because lots of my failed ideas stay dead.
If this is meant as any kind of advice, I suppose it would have to do with persistence. Be persistent when tackling something you feel holds promise. Because writing is a very dodgy enterprise, full of hits and misses, and the more arrows you fire at your target, the better chance you have of eventually hitting it.
This, of course, can take a lot of time.
It also helps to do the research. Don't skimp on it. Order the $1500 doll, try it out. The cheap blow-up one too. Ignorance is no excuse for bad writing.
--cranefly