I write fast. I type and type until I'm tired of typing, and then I go back and look at what I read and find out if there's anything good in it. It's all perfect, of course, every time, with no needs for revision or changes, because I am super awesome. Duh.
See, that's the thing that I've learned - if I'm going to be a fast writer (and I am - writing carefully puts me right to sleep) then I'm going to have to spend a lot of time in re-reading and revision, because otherwise the story is going to turn out to be a hot mess. I'm not one of those people who can sit and think about every word put down on paper as it happens. I can't labor over a sentence for days. It's boring. It's a sentence. Subject, verb, maybe an object or or something and move on! I can't be spending all my damn time on a single sentence. Nothing would ever get done - I have a day job, people.
In truth, I probably spend just as much time in the aggregate worrying about word choice and sentence structure and form. But I just can't do it all at once. When I write, I enter this sort of fugue state, where I don't really know what I'm writing. I mean, I can see it, I can hear the words in my head, but I'm not judging them or fixing them or moving them around. I won't say something stupid about how "my muse is dictating to me" or whatever, but it is a different part of me from my standard rational mind.
This is how I've always written creatively, for as long as I can remember. There can be problems with it - I've written myself into a corner more than once. I've had to lose pages, even chapters, because I went down the wrong path and have to backtrack. I've had to lose whole characters, characters I've really loved. Whole storylines, in fact. It sucks. But it can also be fantastic, like when I do a reread and discover that I've set up something exciting, or had a brillant turn of phrase, or made something interesting happen. It's a little bit like magic.
See, that's the thing that I've learned - if I'm going to be a fast writer (and I am - writing carefully puts me right to sleep) then I'm going to have to spend a lot of time in re-reading and revision, because otherwise the story is going to turn out to be a hot mess. I'm not one of those people who can sit and think about every word put down on paper as it happens. I can't labor over a sentence for days. It's boring. It's a sentence. Subject, verb, maybe an object or or something and move on! I can't be spending all my damn time on a single sentence. Nothing would ever get done - I have a day job, people.
In truth, I probably spend just as much time in the aggregate worrying about word choice and sentence structure and form. But I just can't do it all at once. When I write, I enter this sort of fugue state, where I don't really know what I'm writing. I mean, I can see it, I can hear the words in my head, but I'm not judging them or fixing them or moving them around. I won't say something stupid about how "my muse is dictating to me" or whatever, but it is a different part of me from my standard rational mind.
This is how I've always written creatively, for as long as I can remember. There can be problems with it - I've written myself into a corner more than once. I've had to lose pages, even chapters, because I went down the wrong path and have to backtrack. I've had to lose whole characters, characters I've really loved. Whole storylines, in fact. It sucks. But it can also be fantastic, like when I do a reread and discover that I've set up something exciting, or had a brillant turn of phrase, or made something interesting happen. It's a little bit like magic.
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