What I learned writing.

nikkxb:

I said I would do an official post of my experience and the various things I learned in the month of April. (Daily recaps can be found here.) I planned on looking back at those posts and using them as a guide to sum up my experience, so are the Three Main Lessons I Learned Participating in Camp NaNoWriMo.

1. Writing Sucks.

It does. It sucks a giant bag of flaming dicks because it’s not easy. It’s not consistent. It’s not anything you can really count on unless you do it every day. And writing every day doesn’t allow you the distance you need to properly evaluate your work. 

I can’t tell you how many scenes I wrote that I know will end up deleted from the final draft. So many scenes. That’s part of writing. You’re going to write things that will never see the light of day. It’s going to suck, it’s going to tear down your confidence, and it’s going to leave you feeling hopeless with no where to go.

And that’s okay. It’s okay because Writing Sucks and as soon as I accepted that I wasn’t going to vomit out a masterpiece on my first go, I allowed it to suck. I let my writing be crappy and redundant and not make any sense with the plot. And it was because I slugged through the suckage that I learned more about my characters, that I grew to identify things they’d been hiding from me, and that I was able to identify an actual plot and actual issues and actual pieces of gold after sifting through all that dirt.

Part of how I did it brings me to my next lesson.

2. Writing isn’t a solitary hobby.

My main male character is ridiculously easy for me to write. I get him. I’m pretty certain he’s been in my head for years, just biding his time until I was able to give him the attention he needed. Scenes following him flowed, his voice was so clear to me, and I wrote a good majority of those 50k words standing over his shoulder.

My main female character? I can’t get a damn sentence out of her mouth that actually fits without massively reworking it. I don’t get her. I understand her character and I recognize when what I write is wrong, but there’s so much about her I don’t see immediately and I could not have been able to write her without the guidance of a very close friend.

(If you followed my posts, you know I met up with my Writer Friend every Thursday. The angel that saved my female character is Writer Friend’s Wife.)

WFW loved asking me about my story, mostly because I was writing paranormal fantasy and she’s drawn to historical fiction. She said it was interesting to watch the development of this kind of story when it’s something she’d never write. I, gasping for air as soon as the month started, took all the help I could get.

And it worked. WFW saw my female character clearly. She identified with her. When I had an issue with FC, I would simply talk to WFW and see where I went wrong. It was ridiculous how much those two ended up having in common when my character was never supposed to resemble someone I knew in real life. (Funny how writing doesn’t ever do what you plan for it to do.) Without that help, though, I wouldn’t have the story I have and I damned certain I wouldn’t have the potential my characters gave me.

I said earlier that writing every day doesn’t offer the distance you need to evaluate your work, but having an outside friend to bounce ideas off of does. You don’t need to take a week off to gain a clear view when you have people around you that already have that distance. I found a very valuable resource with her.

3. Research ONLY when you absolutely need to.

I’m going against pretty much everything I’ve ever believed with this one, but sometimes you shouldn’t research when writing your first draft. Sometimes, you should just write. Write whatever you need to and if you can fake it, fake it until the draft is complete.

Know what I had to learn pretty quickly? Researching = procrastinating. Big time. I procrastinated hard when I sat down to research. Countless hours later and I’m no closer to continuing my plot than I was before. I lost days convincing myself I needed to research before I continued writing. Did my research help? A bit! Some of it changed the direction I was going in and I’m really grateful I looked it up. Was it necessary? No. Most of it wasn’t. Not at all.

There are going to be some things you need to research. Cultures, history, languages, weapons, so many different things. But how much of that research is absolutely mandatory when writing the first draft? Not as near as much as you think. You can get pretty far half-assing it while you’re focusing on the plot, then go back in and fix the details. I learned that the hard way and the further I got in my draft, the more notes I made. 

I have countless notes telling me what I need to research when I’ve started working on editing this thing. That research might change a hell of a lot, but I’m already going to be editing. I’ll already be changing a lot of things, why not do that all together? I was losing valuable time “researching” when I should have just been writing. It made absolutely no sense to drag out the writing process over a few changes that would be easier made after the first draft was finished.

If you absolutely cannot continue writing without looking something up, look it up. And then get back to writing. The rest of it can wait.