rewriting, rewriting, rewriting.

"In those early pages and chapters anyone may find bold leaps to nowhere, read the brave beginnings of dropped themes, hear a tone since abandoned, discover blind alleys track red herrings and laboriously learn a setting now false."

-Annie Dillard.

It takes a lot out of any writer to be forced to part with their words. It takes courage and faith to let go entirely. It's necessary however to move forward.  The real writing process begins with a draft.  The first copy you show to another human being, the first soul crushing edits you receive, that is where progress is made and where great stories are born.

That's not to say threads can't be saved to bind together new ideas. Perhaps a few sentences from a page are what's left after the edits, whole paragraphs even.  It won't be easy but it will be helpful.  Once you've reached that ninth edition of prose it should look nothing like the first draft you wrote in the wee hours of the morning.

It can be hard, but its best, once finished, to get up and leave your work. Let it steep and give yourself a break. Go back to it, read it out loud, read it in funny voices, read it to your stuffed animals. Then sit down again and be honest with yourself. Was that description necessary? Could I have written a stronger opening? Is that character too flimsy? DON'T LIE, you're only ruining your work.

Just like people change, stories change. From day one to day 67, your characters may undergo some major personality altercations, your themes may not wish to be straightforward and weak, and you yourself may not wish to ever see the same words on a page for fear of going insane.

So in short, no one will ever write perfect first words. Thinking so will only weaken you as a writer and as a person. So delete, scratch out, or throw away what you thought was gold and rebuild with courage that you did not just throw away the best story ever written, but you will soon be much closer to it.



http://theamericanscholar.org/endless-rewriting/#.Ut2UsWasEy4

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The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

Voice: The Underdog

When I was six, my grandfather made this pink notebook for me. “Kathleen’s Love Stories” was its title. I wrote some pretty ratty writing in it. A few years later, he and I started writing together; mostly short stories that I’d make up and that he’d edit.

He had been the editor of a small-time magazine in our hometown. After reading something that I’d written, he’d tell me not to use such big words. “It’s bogging your story down. Your voice isn’t coming through.” I'd muddled this over and decided I completely disagreed, at 11 years old. Using big words made me look smart! I now appreciate the lesson my grandfather was trying to teach me.

Voice is probably one of the trickiest things to master as a writer. In theory, it sounds simple. How hard can using your own voice be? But when you sit down and start writing, the autopilot editor in your brain takes over. Then when you’ve read over what you’ve sat down and written, you see that the voice is foreign. Who is it?

The foreign voice weakens the writing.

If you’ve struggled with “finding your voice” in your own writing, look no further for help than Annie Dillard or J.D Salinger. Both authors have extremely different voices, but both are extremely true to their writing. 

Dillard’s novel The Writing Life is one of my personal favorites. Dillard writes of the trials and tribulations of leading life as a writer. She’s brilliant. Salinger wrote Catcher in the Rye, a story with zero plot lead by the lovable fuck-up, Holden. Dillard is whimsical in her writing while Salinger is choppy and blunt. Both styles work for different reasons. Namely, the form of the writing fits the content of the writing.

Writers achieve these different "voices" not just by what is being written, but how it's being written. A writer's sentence structure, grammar, and use of punctuation all influence how a line is internally read. Experiment with these devices. Read them out loud to yourself and make different variations of the same sentence. But most of all, relax. Let your voice come through. It's the best one you've got.