Sunday, February 19, 2017

Writing, editing, structuring

The biggest problem I have isn't writing, it's structuring writing. Making a long piece of fiction make sense is fucking hard! No really, you can conceive of a complete story in your head and have it all turn to shit once it hits paper.

I can't stop obsessing over this. Is it a "writer" problem or just a "me" problem? The un-fun aspects of writing are rarely talked about, There's much said about inspiration, about writer's block and how to get your ideas on paper, but very little about the dirty work required once you've vomited those ideas all over the page.

As a child, when I wanted to makes something, I'd taken an existing thing apart and lay all its pieces out on the floor to see how they were interconnected. A few years ago, I did the same thing with a novel I was reading. I literally dissected it, chapter by chapter, and made a timeline to have a visual representation of how the narrative "flowed." I recently did that with one of my drafts, and I plan on doing it with a second. I can't say yet if it's working, but I can spot some of the flaws easier than I would if I had to treat it as some big thing, and that's a plus.