Going Spelunking

[mobiusstripper]

Tonight's the night, y'all. I am going to wade into the depths of an abandoned draft and start rewriting. There is NOTHING I hate more than reading my own drafts. I will procrastinate for months between finishing a draft and editing because I hate it so much. Back when I used to act, I could never watch myself on video. It's the same exact thing. I know it's bad and completely unsustainable for an artist, and it's something I acknowledge that I need to just get over.

The funny part is that the draft is usually not that terrible in the end, and even if parts of it are truly awful, it's not that hard to fix. I'm not sure what I'm so afraid of. I suspect part of the problem is that I force myself to go into a trance and shove aside my inner control freak while I'm writing because if I didn't, I'd never get a single word onto the page. But then I need that control freak part of me to be at peak performance to edit, and the control freak part of my mind is intimidated by the uninhibited part and the potentially weird, embarrassing, uncomfortable stuff it has to say. At the same time, weird and uncomfortable is ON BRAND for me and something I actively cultivate, BUT in a very specific way. Weird and uncomfortable in a targeted, thought-out way is good. Unintentionally weird and uncomfortable is bad.

Do I need to rethink my need for control over my attempts at transgression? It makes me think of my senior year of undergrad when I was in this religious studies seminar. It dealt with surveillance, imperialism, and authoritarianism as modern representations of the eyes of God. You know, classic liberal arts shit, highly mock-able. But it was a great course with a brilliant professor. Anyway I wrote a paper on the book Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, which features a conspiracy called the Wallflower Order that is basically the white patriarchal colonialist anti-fun brigade. They, like me, crave control and hate dancing, but, unlike me, they want to piss on everybody's parade. So I wrote the first draft of my paper and went to discuss it with my professor in office hours. He read it, and then he said, "It's an exemplary essay, and that's the problem. It's like it was written by the Wallflower Order."

Therein lies my predicament.

Comments

[mobiusstripper]

It's hard for me to be prolific! I have a lot of trouble getting words down when I don't know what exactly I want to write. I definitely notice a BIG difference in quality between when I plan and when I don't, but if I put off writing too long while I plan, I end up in a "shit or get off the pot" situation. I've had the most success with writing something crappy and then completely rewriting it once I've found the general shape. So I'll just start writing whatever the fuck, and occasionally I end up with something either interesting enough to develop into a serious project or something that can be rewritten into something good. I think that's a pretty common writing method. I'm also quite lazy, and that's a problem. I get pissy when I set aside the time and make the effort to write and it doesn't turn into anything good.

[purglepurglepurgle]

Ah yeah, I just have to write immediately if I get an idea, because otherwise it is never making it onto the page... There's maybe a 2-day window where I can retrieve it, max, and then it's lost to the void. So the way I get things done is a) have something else I'm supposed to be doing, b) have a ton of fic ideas BECAUSE I'm supposed to be doing something else and my brain is a troll, c) neglect my work. The drafts vary a lot (sometimes get rewritten entirely, sometimes are minimally edited) and do turn out better if planned, needing fewer edits-- but yeah, more planning increases the likelihood that nothing will get written... I've taken to writing on my phone a lot, which is the most awkward way to write physically, but is the only way to scrawl things out when you get ideas after you've gone to bed and you want to preserve the wording before you forget why you were interested in them...