How brutal are you?

[Lucky Joe]

When it comes to your own work just how brutal are you?

Are you able to view your work with detacted objectivity and a pair of shears? Or do you cling obsessively to every single word you've ever written?

I try to be objective, I left my last piece alone for six months after finishing the first draft (It sounds more impressive than it is, I was on another continent and so couldn't work on it) and came back fresh, I was able to see what (I thought) its strengths and weakness were and editted accordingly.

How do you guys cope with the prospect of discarding page after page in the hope of tightening your work?

 

[IaNo]

Luckily Joe, I don't have that problem. I know my current WIP sucks and I'm a good judge of things sucking. Fortunately I know that I can make it good with a bit of hard work and revision. Also, my main problem with it is not that it needs tightening. If anything, it needs loosening and expanding. Certainly, small parts will need corrective editing and tightening, but overall my first goal is to expand more on it and then I'll get to cut down. When that point comes I'll have no problem deleting any parts or shortening them. But then again, when I consider the fact that 90& of published material is over wordy and repetitive, what's the need?

 

[Chlestron]

I started off not that great. It's a skill that you learn as you go along. Now, I have few qualms with slicing and dicing chunks of irrelevant material. However, I AM bad at seeing those until the story is done and only then after I come back to it some time later.

 

[Bardos]

I'm certainly brutal, as far as words are concerned! At the mo, I'm editing a novel and I'm bored of copying and pasting stuff. Aaaarghhh!! --editing is a fu#$%* stinking work... but someones got to do it. Guess who that "someone" is...

What I rarely change is the plot and the scenes, except if there is a huge mistake there. (Once, I had forgotten a character in some --ahem, many-- scenes and I had to ADD her in all of them!) I try to make the story good the first time around.

 

[kater]

Guilty of being brutally analytical about mine and everyone else's work - I once canned a piece that was 127 pages long because I couldn't do the idea justice, I guess thats the damning thing when it comes to writing and you can't recreate the images from your head onto the paper = its true that the best novels of all time have never been written

 

[Twelve]

Oh my. I cling quite hard to every sentence that I write. I feel its a tragedy if I write a paragraph and it is deleted by mistake... I feel that my first thougts are always the best.

Of course, this is after I check it for grammar, typos, word choice, sentence structure, etc.


12

 

[DecKrash]

I don't think I'm brutal enough, but I know that to get a good critique of your work, you must have others who you don't know review it. Only then can you get an honest opinion. I've found out that it helps quite a bit. But then again, if you can't impress the editors when it's time to sumbit, then it all comes to naught. ^_^;;

 

[Richardb]

Brutal with my own stuff... a bit less so with others. I have a job in which sensitivity around 'performance' is just not compatible with survival. So, my writing just sort of follow suit. I take part in a writers group where we hack each others stuff weekly, and freely share my writing with whoever wants to read it. I always write because I have a story to tell. Learned early on that not everyone appreciates the story...
If you are serious about writing, and trying to improve, you have to be brutal, and have thick skin.

 

[milamber_reborn]

Whilst I'm my number one fan, I readily invite people to honestly critique my work. Even if you think you are good you can be a lot better. There's no limit on how good you write. You just have to use every resource available to improve. I tend to refine my work rather than brutalise it. I leave that to other people.

 

[Aik Haw]

I found out that the best way for me to be my own sharpest pair of shears is, after finishing the writing, leave the work for 2 to 3 weeks.

By then, your enthusiasm for the work has tapered off slightly, which means you become the best pair of shear as you are now reading it not as the author, but as the reader. If you dislike your work, so will your reader.

 

[kahnovitch]

Originally posted by kater
its true that the best novels of all time have never been written

That is so bloody true!
I have some great concepts and ideas, but getting the buggers down on paper is a feat that Hercules himself would fail to achieve.
I think the problem is with filling in the little details that make a story flow.
The ordinary everyday stuff in the story that is too boring to write to mention , but yet must be addressed and tackled.
The balance between action, suspense, character conflicts, degrees of description etc.

 

[mistri]

I find that if I start revising my work as I'm writing there's a tendency for me to get overly negative and spends ages trying to perfect everything.

Something I hear a lot on another forum I visit is 'allow yourself to write crap' and I think (that for me at least) that's a great idea. At the moment I try to write at least a full chapter/short story in first draft before revising it. When I finish shorts (and I intend to do this with my novel if I ever finish it) I leave them for at least a couple of weeks so that I'm not so 'close' to the text.

 

[Lucky Joe]

Originally posted by Mistri

Something I hear a lot on another forum I visit is 'allow yourself to write crap' and I think (that for me at least) that's a great idea.

That sounds like a fantastic idea, and at least then if you going into it with that attitude you won't beat yourself up when you go back over it and see that it is crap (my point is that would allow you to progress without worrying about what you've already done). I always try and finish the first draft without editing at all, (and that usually means there's a lot of crap in there) but then once I've got everything down I can go back and 'attempt' to perfect it.

 

[wolfie]

LOL....I'm exceptionally brutal of my own work. It is never good enough, but I've finally reached the point where I can admit that I do have talent, and that was a big step for me. I have yelled at my friends for being too positive! hehehe. But then again, as much as I need criticism, I hate for someone to actually "hate" what I've written. That I take as a personal failure, even though the rational part of me knows that everyone has different tastes.

There are certain passages in certain stories that I've written that I do have a hard time giving up on, even when I've acknowledged that it doesn't work for that story. So, I've found a way to soothe that ache...I just copy it into a document that I have that contains all the snippets or sentences or word combinations that I really like. That way, I haven't thrown them out, but have saved them for a rainy day. And you know what? A couple of them have actually turned into their own stories. So, it's all good and I was able to keep the original story true to its own voice and mood.

But oh yes, I am brutal about my work...but much kinder towards others. I think it's human nature.....oh, ok....maybe not...but for me it is, at least...*chuckles*

 

[Brian G Turner]

Rewriting seems to be a natural part of the writing process - you start with a concept that eveolves, and the rest of your work already written has to be forcefully evolved (re-written) with it.

However, the other brutality is trimming down information to barest bones - removing all those superfluous adjectives and adverbs. I figure the markets want something tight without those features. I refuse to be precious with my WIP. Not necessarily so with other projects...

 

[Lucky Joe]

Reading author interviews one thing that seems to come across from most of them is that it's in the editing process that the book is essentially written.

I recently read that a couple of my favourite authors usually work through about 10 drafts before they consider their work finished 10!!! And then they send it to their publisher and may have to work through even more drafts before the publisher considers it finished.

I thought the five drafts I worked through on my only 'finished' novel was a lot.

10!!!