Theme of the Day: Imperfection

[alanajoli]

The theme in several recent blogs (and an e-mail from my marvelous editor Shawn Merwin) is that, as writers, we can't expect perfection from our work. While curtailing bad habits is never a bad idea, the main job of the writer is getting the words down on paper to tell the story. Will it have flaws? Certainly. Is the editor going to do their best to make those flaws vanish or suddenly transform? Absolutely.

Is it going to be perfect when it comes out in print? Probably not. user had a great post about this yesterday--accepting the final for what it is and letting go of all of those changes that, were it in a different stage, we'd still choose to make.

One of the struggles for me is that, along with being a writer, I'm also trained as an editor. (Some of my best editorial training actually came from being a writing tutor in college, learning how to get a student to see where a paper or story wanted to go, where the strong points were, and how to bring it all together, without getting them to go on the defense. It was really marvelous practice.) When I'm writing, I have to let the inner editor go, and vice versa--in editing someone else's work, keeping the tone identical to the voice they've created is important, so my own inner writer has to stay in place. Keeping those roles separate is a challenge, because I'm not sure that being good at the one actually makes you better at the other. I actually hope that the skills compliment each other, but I can't remember a time when I wasn't actually inclined toward (if not trained for) both.

Now that I've also become a reviewer, it gets even further complicated, but that may be a topic for another time. :)

So the theme of the day is this: strive for perfection, but be neither surprised nor ashamed when your editor hands you back something with red marks. As an editor once told me: It's good for the story to bleed a little bit before it's finished.

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A couple of good conversations I recommend following:

melissa_writing has a nice thread about research worth reading. I played devil's advocate over there in a response almost as large as my normal blog post size. I'm hoping someone will respond. :)

sartorias has a few days old (at this point) discussion about meta-fiction vs. fan fiction vs. derivative fiction with comments out the wazoo. Worth reading.

mistborn's last entry in his series on "Ten Bad Elements of Storytelling (We All Use)" is on the device of the Deus Ex Machina, a personal pet peeve of mine. His essay on the subject was quite good. The whole series has actually been worth reading, so if you have some time to back read, check it out.

Comments

[bccreations.livejournal.com]

But if I focus too much on thinking about getting it on paper perfectly the first time, I lose my focus

And well you should. But is that actually utilizing your editorial skills? I would say its an exercise in insecurity, not editing. You can't edit until you've written. Write. Edit. Rewrite. Edit. If you try to edit while you're writing, of course you're going to get stuck. One thing at a time.

[alanajoli.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see what you're saying, which is very different from the point I thought we were headed toward. Being able to edit, and editing your own work, is definitely a benefit of being trained in both editing and writing. As long as the processes are separated as steps, then yes, I agree. Trying to do both at the same time, trying to edit the writing as it happens, is what makes the process stall out. And that's really the only bit I'm objecting to.

That said, I also tend to prefer an external editor to my own editing on my own work, if only because, since they're not in my head, they don't know all the background that, for me, is just assumed. Shawn and I were working on one scene in Departure where he thought something was a "big reveal." To me, it had been a known factor, but was a knife twist to the character who was on the receiving end of the dialogue. The whole relationship between the two characters engaged in dialogue in that one scene was, therefore, unclear in the novel as a whole--something that I would never have noticed on my own.