As I’ve said before, my biggest barrier to achieving my dream – which is to write as many of the stories inside me as vividly and well as I can before I die, and entertain and delight you and the world – is the compulsion to get it right the first time.
No doubt for some people that serves fine. For me it’s poison.
So I’m happy today to report progress in not getting it right the first time.
Along with my story for the new Wild Cards anthology, and hammering together a plot for my next Deathlands action/adventure novel, I’m getting bakc into fuill swing on what I expect, and hope, will be the last major rewrite of The Dinosaur Lords.
After way too long I finally realized that, whatever I was revising, I needed to read through the chapter or story once before changing anything. Otherwise I start adding stuff I think it needs, only to find out I already put it in farther down. Then I flutter in circles, going Ohgodohgodohhgod, whaddoIdowhaddoIdowhaddoIdo? Which, keen of eye and brain as you are, you’ve noticed is a swell way not to get anything productive done.
So I started doing preliminary read-throughs, so I’d have a firmer grasp of what was going on, and what I’d said where. All good.
You also may recall that for a while I was afflicted with a terrible disease that caused me to pack way too much content into my sentences, which rendered them hard to follow or even read. Last fall the counsel of that invaluable resource, the Critical Mass writers group, I was able to start kicking that awful habit.
More recently, following the group’s advice as well as that of other writers I talk to, I decided I needed to read my stuff aloud when I went over it prior to rewriting, to ensure that it flowed and was, you know, comprehensible.
So yesterday I got back to revising DinoLords and tried that. I got a late start, in part because I’d gotten a horrible sleep the night before, in part because Joe turned up around noon with coffee and donuts, which we sat on the porch to consume as we conversed, and had a fine old time on the last of his four-day weekend. Which was fine, especially since I’d (finally) finished the rewrite of my previous Deathlands novel and sent it off.
However I almost immediately encountered a problem: when I stumbled rereading a passage aloud, that indicated a strong need to rewrite, or at least put it on the watch list. When I went back again to do the revising, I might not remember those trouble spots. But if I went ahead and fixed it, or even noted it – well, we were back to the very problem I was trying to fix.
So I bagged it. I had started. I had made a good faith effort. That was enough. I was too tired to wrestle with it any more, and (just) smart enough to know it was foolish to try.
Last night I got a very good sleep. So I came back to the rewrite fresh today.
Here’s what I would have done, in the old days: gotten frustrated because my new technique failed. Thrown it all out in disgust and gone back to my old, flawed way of doing things. Because, you know, it sort of worked, and I couldn’t change.
Here’s what I did: stepped back, took a look at my process. Realized what I could try was to do the review read-through silently, making no corrections or even notes per plan. Then, when I embarked upon the rewrite, that was when I’d read over it aloud. That way I could find interruptions in the flow as well as other needed changes.
I tried it. When I made changes, I read the affected passage out loud again, to make sure it read well. Then I drove on.
And you know what? So far it works like a son of a Mitch.
I am, as you no doubt observed, inordinately pleased. That’s because this was both a minor victory and a major one. Minor, in that I improved my process notably by making a small change in the order I did things. Major, because I allowed myself to try the first technique, to be flexible, to see what worked and then fix what didn’t.
Just doing that is a big step for me. It brings me that much closer to writing – creating, carrying out the whole process of producing entertaining stories – the way I’ve known for years would be most successful for me. It removed yet another self-imposed barrier. Which are the things which have always held me back the worst.
So I’ve learned another lesson in how not to get it right the first time. And thereby get it really right in the end.
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Awesome!
^_^