reflections on december

I’ve harped on this for months now, but I think I learned a lot about the writing process. I haven’t had this much of a learning experience in a very long time, so I keep coming back to it. Some things I learned were:

• You write by writing. Yes, it is a truism. Shush. Everyday, if you can. The “muse” is not going to inspire you if you don’t write. Most of the inspiration comes from having you having so many ideas in your head that some of them merge and meld and become a story. If you aren’t writing, you aren’t thinking about your story as much as you could be, so you are going to be short on this so-called inspiration.
• You shouldn’t be so afraid of writing a word that isn’t just perfect for the scene, because it’ll make you afraid of writing a phrase that isn’t just perfect, then a sentence, then a paragraph, then a scene, then a chapter, then a book. Then you’ll have nothing, rather than some good and some bad writing. There is a backspace key for a reason, so stop being a chicken. Leave a note to yourself to come back and fix that word/phrase/sentence/etc. but just keep going.
• I’m not so good without a general outline. I can write scenes and dialog ok, but I can’t come up with the actual story arc on the fly.
• I can make at least one reader laugh and feel sad at appropriate moments. It’s a really good feeling to hear someone chuckling as they read something you wrote.
  
• The editing process of a book is no less important than the editing procress of a movie. It’s not just replacing some words and fixing typos. Sometimes, you’ll have to shuffle around your scenes, some will need to be “reshot” and some will be dropped altogether. Many new scenes may have to be written to make the story flow correctly. The story might get cut in half, or grow to more than twice the original size.
  
• I’m definitely doing this again this year! I loved the feeling of accomplishment, and my first complete read-through made me think that it wasn’t all that bad for a first draft.