camilliar said: oh my god, that’s quite a process
sockich said: Damn, that looks impressive. I’m glad it’s working and your brain is making you happy! (Also, I’ve been squinting at this until I managed to read at least parts of it an ahhhhhh SO EXCITED!)
It’s not meant to look ~impressive or anything - though, I mean, I also suffer from the mystique stuff that means it would, if it weren’t me doing it. But I wish I could just write and edit into a text file, that would be more impressive. So much simpler! So much faster!
I write and edit with paper and pen because I have to, I can’t stay focused on anything if I’m on the computer. It introduces annoying extra steps of typing shit in, printing it out, repeat, but - eh. I try to get away from it, but it doesn’t work. (Also the physical joy in playing with colors, making shapes, is a nice feedback-y part of the process.) (As for why you may see the times noted down in the margins here and there and everywhere? I just write it down every so often to help myself feel like I’m making ~progress.)
And the multi-step shit if it’s visible! The three colors of pens, the scrap paper. It’s not, like, to make shit more complicated on purpose. I would like writing/revising to be simpler. Complicated takes time. But it seems - I need to be able to break shit down sentence by sentence, pull out a sentence or three or a phrase and make space to say to myself, ‘out loud’ if necessary - okay, what is this trying to say/do? Pull up options from the murky depths of my brain and throw them at the page.
I don’t, again, like, want to have to go over my stories fucking phrase by phrase. But I don’t think there’s another option, if I want to not hate them. (And not hating them is great, it’s the best thing.) Stories are made out of sentences, that’s what they are. There’s no way in the world to fix bigger picture shit except rewriting sentence by sentence.
(There is, obviously, also, the option of deleting and/or adding significantly larger chunks - which I’ve also been doing, even in a short piece like this, it just didn’t happen to be visible in that snapshot. But even when you add a new scene, say, afterwards you’ll still have to go sentence-by-sentence on it too, to make it do what you want.)
@camilliar the connection might not be apparent outside my brain, but the things you said about what my revising had been doing and not doing helped me figure out a lot, THANK YOUUUU.
@sockich I’m excited you’re excited!? okay now I need to get back to it <#33.
