I like the idea of throwing up really unedited writing excerpts on this blog. Later I can paste them together in a word document and prune through it for errors and trim out stuff I don't like. I'm getting a lot better about just writing and getting my ideas onto the paper instead of relentlessly self-editing as I go. My results may be imperfect but its infinitely better than writing nothing at all. I can always go through multiple iterations until I'm satisfied with what I end up with. Just writing the 1500 words that comprise my three recent writing entries is more than I've written in years. I'm proud that I'm doing anything at all, honestly.
Sometimes I feel like the only way I can write without driving myself crazy is to just hurtle into it haphazardly, immediately banishing my previous words from my mind. It's the only way I can write without giving in to my own criticism. I'm learning that if I want to get to a satisfying place, I have to start out with something that isn't satisfying. I've never been able to deal with that before. It's a hard thing to learn. It's inevitable though, when you spend so many years not exercising your creative muscles that they atrophy a little. Just gotta keep flexing them.
I'm not really sure where I'm taking this story. I have to be careful about thinking about it too much because if I get bogged down in analysis its going to ruin it for me. It will suddenly feel like it's not good enough and I'll lose the urge to continue. Right now I just need to focus on cranking out more content, more exposition. I have to tell more of the story. I have to meet new characters, write more dialogue, write down my characters' thoughts. If it ends up being something that I hadn't planned, great. Let's see what we can do with that and branch out from there. This is a story I wrote and rewrote a lot when I was younger. There are a lot of aspects of that story that I like but there's a lot that definitely won't resurface. I may end up completely recreating that character into something different. I want to create a fleshed-out, flawed, human character.
Still, now is not the time to start sweating the details. "Oh, you should have told the reader the character's name by now. Your character's whining too much. Your character doesn't have a clear motivation." Those are things I can worry about later. I know my character's motivations and I know his name. I don't think they need to be revealed so early on... and I don't want to move things too quickly, either. I want to spend some time in the woods, in the rain, and really revel in the misery and surreality of it.
In the past I always felt like I needed to write up a huge backstory of the world my characters lived in to get a sense of how to write the story. I don't think I want to do that this time. Is "making it up as you go along" really that bad a thing? Look at Breaking Bad. It's one of, if not the best, television series of all time. They had a general framework for how they wanted the series to go but for the most part it was not planned in advance. But here we are, a few days from the final episode, and we're hurtling toward a thrilling conclusion. It's thrilling not only for the audience but I imagine for the writers as well. It was a natural evolution for their character but it was a journey of discovery from them as well. Is that self-indulgent? I'm not sure I mind either way.
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