[I was super sleep deprived when I wrote that last comment, and I get weird about this stuff even at the best of times, so I apologize for getting all up in your comments with my feelings!]
No worries! Fiction is an emotion-y thing. :P (Even when I am super-bad at emotions.)
[And (despite what my upbringing led me to believe) it is okay to have a hobby and spend your time and energy on something that doesn't have a profitable, tangible result that you can show people.]
Hah. It is, indeed! I find that, for me, I really want to be able to use the things I love to make me money, because then it would cut down on the number of things I didn't love but had to do in order to make money. But there are definitely still things – hi, fanfic, I see you there – which I've been told I should probably grow out of, but I refuse to, because this is my happy place goddamnit and when original fiction is stressing me out because I don't know how to make it work and I don't know why anyone is paying me for this stuff and I'm convinced that the next thing I send out, they'll all figure out that I'm a hack and they'll stop humoring me... fanfic is where I can come back to where I can dial down all those anxieties, if not wipe them away entirely.
Though, speaking of writing-as-game, have you ever done, like, an LJ or DW-based RP? They can be really fantastic, if you find good ones.
[I'm curious whether you have that issue with your own stuff.]
Oh god, yes. You have no idea. One of the things I keep saying, only half-jokingly, is that by the time I start sending things out to magazines, I usually hate it. Which may be some kind of protective response I developed because that way, if it gets rejected, I can go "Yeah, that makes sense" and not feel hurt that the editor didn't enjoy it. Of course they didn't enjoy it; it was completely broken!
How I get to a poing where I think it's good enough to submit? Basically, it's when I get to a point where it's the best that I can make it. If I'm reading over it and I can't figure out how to fix or improve it, that probably means that it's the best my skills are capable of at this moment. And as for the actual decision to send it out when I don't particularly like it, there's a mix of things that goes into it. One of those things is my awareness that I'm a terrible judge of my own work; I know I'm not seeing the thing unbiased, and so I can't be the one to decide that it's not good enough.
If I send something out, the worst thing that's going to happen is that the magazine won't take it and will tell me why not. (In a way, it's similar to fanfic: if I post a fanfic, the worst thing that's going to happen is that people won't read it. Or they will read it, and they'll tell me things are wrong with it.) And that's just data – failed experiments are just data. Data that can be a hard pill to swallow, sometimes, but that's also where being able to see that it has flaws and agree comes in and helps me.
But if I'm overstating the flaws in my own mind, and if I've produced something that other people will enjoy more than I think they're likely to enjoy it, then if I send it out or post it or whatever, I end up with a payday of some sort – either people will enjoy it and tell me what did work for them and reassure me that I can write, or people will enjoy it and buy it and give me money and reassure me that I can write. And after a while, building up that pattern of favorable responses also helps me to put things out, because I know that such a response is possible even when I don't anticipate it. I can look at something and say "I put in a ton of work on this, and there are parts I like, but I don't know that they'll shine past the parts that are broken that I don't know how to fix," and then think, "but I have a fairly good track record on putting things out when I feel exactly like this, so there's no harm in trying."
I guess the other thing that I have to hang on to is the fact that there was something I really loved about the story, or I wouldn't have started it or gotten it through to completion in the first place. So I have to have some faith that whatever I loved about the story is still there, even if I'm not feeling particularly loving toward it. And sending the story out, or putting it up, is one way of doing right by that thing that I loved.
[And do you enjoy the editing and rewriting process? Does it destroy your affection for your work at all?]
Hahaa, that's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Partly because editing and revising are so often such intrinsic parts of the writing process for me. If we're talking about sitting down with a finished draft, seeing that it doesn't work, and then cracking open its ribs to muddle around with its insides, I guess I don't particularly enjoy it, partially because I don't fully understand how it works. I'm so much more comfortable and confident when I'm tinkering with stuff during the process of writing, when everything still feels elastic.
As for destroying my affection for my work, I don't know. At that stage, it's usually not about affection any more; more like a bull-headed determination to get the story into a state where it can go out the door. When I start hating a story, I usually start hating it somewhere around the 60%-80% completion stage.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2014-03-13 01:22 am (UTC)No worries! Fiction is an emotion-y thing. :P (Even when I am super-bad at emotions.)
[And (despite what my upbringing led me to believe) it is okay to have a hobby and spend your time and energy on something that doesn't have a profitable, tangible result that you can show people.]
Hah. It is, indeed! I find that, for me, I really want to be able to use the things I love to make me money, because then it would cut down on the number of things I didn't love but had to do in order to make money. But there are definitely still things – hi, fanfic, I see you there – which I've been told I should probably grow out of, but I refuse to, because this is my happy place goddamnit and when original fiction is stressing me out because I don't know how to make it work and I don't know why anyone is paying me for this stuff and I'm convinced that the next thing I send out, they'll all figure out that I'm a hack and they'll stop humoring me... fanfic is where I can come back to where I can dial down all those anxieties, if not wipe them away entirely.
Though, speaking of writing-as-game, have you ever done, like, an LJ or DW-based RP? They can be really fantastic, if you find good ones.
[I'm curious whether you have that issue with your own stuff.]
Oh god, yes. You have no idea. One of the things I keep saying, only half-jokingly, is that by the time I start sending things out to magazines, I usually hate it. Which may be some kind of protective response I developed because that way, if it gets rejected, I can go "Yeah, that makes sense" and not feel hurt that the editor didn't enjoy it. Of course they didn't enjoy it; it was completely broken!
How I get to a poing where I think it's good enough to submit? Basically, it's when I get to a point where it's the best that I can make it. If I'm reading over it and I can't figure out how to fix or improve it, that probably means that it's the best my skills are capable of at this moment. And as for the actual decision to send it out when I don't particularly like it, there's a mix of things that goes into it. One of those things is my awareness that I'm a terrible judge of my own work; I know I'm not seeing the thing unbiased, and so I can't be the one to decide that it's not good enough.
If I send something out, the worst thing that's going to happen is that the magazine won't take it and will tell me why not. (In a way, it's similar to fanfic: if I post a fanfic, the worst thing that's going to happen is that people won't read it. Or they will read it, and they'll tell me things are wrong with it.) And that's just data – failed experiments are just data. Data that can be a hard pill to swallow, sometimes, but that's also where being able to see that it has flaws and agree comes in and helps me.
But if I'm overstating the flaws in my own mind, and if I've produced something that other people will enjoy more than I think they're likely to enjoy it, then if I send it out or post it or whatever, I end up with a payday of some sort – either people will enjoy it and tell me what did work for them and reassure me that I can write, or people will enjoy it and buy it and give me money and reassure me that I can write. And after a while, building up that pattern of favorable responses also helps me to put things out, because I know that such a response is possible even when I don't anticipate it. I can look at something and say "I put in a ton of work on this, and there are parts I like, but I don't know that they'll shine past the parts that are broken that I don't know how to fix," and then think, "but I have a fairly good track record on putting things out when I feel exactly like this, so there's no harm in trying."
I guess the other thing that I have to hang on to is the fact that there was something I really loved about the story, or I wouldn't have started it or gotten it through to completion in the first place. So I have to have some faith that whatever I loved about the story is still there, even if I'm not feeling particularly loving toward it. And sending the story out, or putting it up, is one way of doing right by that thing that I loved.
[And do you enjoy the editing and rewriting process? Does it destroy your affection for your work at all?]
Hahaa, that's a surprisingly difficult question to answer. Partly because editing and revising are so often such intrinsic parts of the writing process for me. If we're talking about sitting down with a finished draft, seeing that it doesn't work, and then cracking open its ribs to muddle around with its insides, I guess I don't particularly enjoy it, partially because I don't fully understand how it works. I'm so much more comfortable and confident when I'm tinkering with stuff during the process of writing, when everything still feels elastic.
As for destroying my affection for my work, I don't know. At that stage, it's usually not about affection any more; more like a bull-headed determination to get the story into a state where it can go out the door. When I start hating a story, I usually start hating it somewhere around the 60%-80% completion stage.