On expository clumps, first drafts, and self criticism

[deilaitha]

One of my biggest downfalls as a writer has alway been my tendency to critique myself as I write. A biggest pet peeve of mine when I read books is what has been called the "expository clump," wherein the author just dumps a ton of information on you at once. (I first saw this term in Ursula K. Leguin's Steering the Craft) I have a degree in English and so I consider myself (perhaps falsely) fairly versed in good literature and what distinguishes good writing from bad.

Therefore, when I work on my stories, I tend to write very, very slowly-- sometimes taking hours just to write a single page. I constantly critique myself:

"Are you serious? That phrase is totally cliched."
"Your character is being inconsistent with something you wrote 200 pages ago. Fix it now, or you can't keep writing."
"This is such a big expository clump you should be shot on site."

My tendency to criticize myself is something I've dealt with my whole life; I've recently been getting counselling to help with that.

So I started up a new story that I had an idea for, and I told myself I was just going to work as feverishly as I could on the first draft as possible, to get it down on paper, and then go over and pick through it and make it like a decent work of writing.

Even though I have not gone back and picked over a paragraph, fixed the grammar in every single sentence, checked the spelling of every single word, or been otherwise OCD, I still find myself getting discouraged. I know that when you first draft a story, you are coming up with ideas and need to write a ton of explanatory stuff down that will not be in that form in your final draft. I still find myself trash talking my writing as I go along, telling myself I'm a horrible writer, that no amount of revision can polish the turd of a paragraph I just wrote.

I'm so discouraged right now; the thrill of a new idea I just had is diminished by this obsession I have about avoiding expository clumps. Yes, even in the freakin' first draft.

Does anyone else struggle with this? I sure could use some encouragment, and some advice for how to allow myself to write freely. I started this thing in February and I want to have it done and polished up by January 2013--I'm only at 20,000-ish words and I want this to be novel length.

Thanks for bearing with my ramble.

Pax,
deilaitha

 

[Steerpike]

I used to do that, Deilaitha, and I found it was a really killer in terms of both productivity and motivation. I now view the most important thing as getting that first draft done. So when I sit down and write I now turn off the internal editor and just go at it. I've occasionally produced something in more or less final form with that first draft, but more often do not, and will even lapse into stream of consciousness at times. Ultimately, this has been very successful. Sure, there is a lot I end up getting rid of, but a lot of good also comes out of it and the benefit of having a complete first draft can't be overstated.

My recommendation is to just write. Lose yourself in the writing, if you can, and don't even think about things like cliches, clumps of exposition, and the like.

 

[Tasha]

I have a problem with doing that. What I do, and it may not help, is get a nice large Mocha(any drink of choice) and put some music on that I associate with my story and try to think of what is coming next or excite myself about a scene I really want to write. If that doesn't work I just keep telling myself that all first drafts are bad and that if I never finish it I'm never going to get the chance to go over and fix it all. That usually helps.

Keep at it! I'm sure your work is not as bad as you think it is. All writers tend to think that at some point. You just gotta tell your brain to shut up or it won't get a chance to fix it Good luck with your novel! You have the same deadline as me for my next one!

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

I agree with Steerpike that you have to work at letting yourself go & focus on just finishing first. Your first draft is going to be terrible. The good news is that if you are very self-critical this can be a major asset in revision.

One of the things Hemmingway said any good writer needs is a built-in, shockproof, shit detector. Sounds like you have that covered but don't let it impede your completion of a draft. Use it in the revision process.

Sometimes our psychological make up will try to protect us from fears. The fear of being good enough, or having one's work judged by others can be strong. Silence this. You need to learn to accept critique as a necessary part of the process of becoming a good writer.

All this being said, not everybody writes that way. I believe that Kurt Vonnegut obsessed about every paragraph he wrote until it was perfect. When he typed "The End" he was done... No revision. I'm not recommending this approach though.

Learn to accept the early failure. The beautiful thing about being a writer is that your audience will never see how crappy the initial story really was. The only see the final product.

 

[Penpilot]

First comment, kick the internal editor in the nards and toss him/it/her into the closet until you're ready for them to come out.

Second comment, you're never as bad as you think you are, and you're never as good as you think you are either.

I've had and still have miserable days where every word I'm sure is shite to the nth degree, but I slog through and finish a scene. At the end I jot a few notes in-line about what I think isn't working and move on. Other days, everything is great. The sun is shining, and the words flow, and I think what I'm writing the best scene ever, EVER, and I give all the literary greats the finger, saying choke on my literary gold, suckers.

Then comes the reality check, and I come back for the second draft. Sometimes what I think is shite is actually pretty good, and all the notes about what I though was wrong with it are in themselves actually wrong. Sometimes it's still shite, but again, sometimes it isn't. In this case, I think stuff turns out well because I let myself go and don't worry until later. I just worry about taking care of making progress and getting what needs to be said out without being fancy.

On the flip side, the stuff I initially thought was gold sometimes turns out to be fools gold, very trite, very cliche, and totally crap. I think this happens because there's nothing like a good mood to make everything seem swell even if it isn't.

So in the end, it's kind of 50/50 and everything averages out in terms of good and bad. What I mean is your skills as a writer will fluctuate from day to day, whether you want them to or not, and you won't be able to really tell if it was a good day or bad until you get perspective and distance from the writing. But over the long haul, your true skill level will show through in the quality of the overall work, not just one scene.

Also this is not even getting to the editing yet, another skill entirely. You could be a crappy first drafter but a fantastic editor that can turn shite into gold.

Hopefully some of this makes some sense.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

...you're never as bad as you think you are, and you're never as good as you think you are either.

Right on the $$$.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

One thing you might want to do is undertake a particular exercise:

Write something as fast as you can, around 10,000 words long. Don't slow down, don't go back and edit, nothing. Finish 10,000 words.

Then delete it.

Forever.

Don't try to rewrite it or reuse what you can remember of it in something else. The point here is to create something and then permanently suffer its loss.

I don't know if this will help you, but the hardest thing for me as I'm developing as a writer has been to let go of things. And I've had to do it so many times during my NIP that I can actually perceive the difference in how difficult it is for me to get rid of chunks of work. The entire last three chapters of my book, I threw out completely, and wrote a totally different ending. It was a really liberating experience; I'd put a lot of hard work into those three chapters (including a lot of logistical planning of a battle), but you know what? It wasn't working, and it needed to die. I could have decided to get depressed and discouraged by the fact that I had thrown out 20 hours' worth of work, but that's not productive, because that's how writing gets done.

George R. R. Martin talked about how when he was writing A Dance with Dragons, he rewrote one of the Tyrion chapters seven times. (Which is probably part of the reason why the book took him six years to finish, but I digress.) Great writers throw out 90% of the words they write, because usually the first way you write something is not the best way. So you try one thing, look at it, figure out why it doesn't work, throw it out, and try again. You keep doing that until you've got something really good. Writing is rewriting.

There's nothing wrong in principle with editing as you go; that's what I do a lot of the time, although I tend to plan the story more in advance and do more copyediting on the fly (not to toot my own horn but my prose style is excellent, even on my first exploratory pass at a chapter). The hardest thing is to analyze the structure and characters in a chapter, and not just pick at the wording. Putting on a new coat of adjectives is easier than tearing out a load-bearing metaphor, but it's not always what the story needs.