astroloquacious replied to your post “replies and

[dragonlady7]

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astroloquacious https://astroloquacious.tumblr.com/ replied to your post “replies and asks and such” https://bomberqueen17.tumblr.com/post/626198592582008832/replies-and-asks-and-such

because the book in your head isn’t REAL or CONCRETE and is therefore incapable of having flaws. And being so upset at the flaws that you don’t write means you aren’t improving. To paraphrase Ira Glass, the only way to get your work up to the quality of your taste is to first produce a lot of shit. Also I was 100% right and please tell me more about dumbass paladins and the incredibly exasperated handlers who love them. Lawful Stupids & Lawful Assholes are the best.

I just gotta address one thing in this very sweet message (which I did enjoy but I feel deserves a response!), which is that the only way to get your work up to the quality of your taste is to first produce a lot of shit –

I have written literally a million words of drafts of this novel, so far; I started work on it in 2003.

Please believe me, the problem with this novel, and all of them, is not that I have not produced a lot of shit already.

It has taught me a lot of things! it sure has! I learned close 3rd POV when I threw away the entire third draft of the book and started from scratch completely rewriting it in 1st person so that I could then re-translate it to 3rd person. It was 200,000 words long at the time and I did a complete retype with no copy-pasting, both times. (That was approximately 2004-5, I think, though the file dates aren’t definitive since I’ve switched computers a couple of times since then.)

I just. Haven’t made a full coherent draft any of those times, and took all these breaks to write fanfic instead so I could get some feedback (and in the midst of that, took breaks from fanfic to not write at all, which did rather bad things to my psyche, but not really worse things than spending my life getting laughed at for wanting to write a novel, really; you gotta balance this shit).

But it’s not that I lack faith or confidence or haven’t practiced. It’s just that I’ve spent a lot of time burning myself to acquire some skill and it’s hard to bravely plunge back in again, and by now I’m extremely skeptical of that novel ever being anything worth anything on its own as opposed to an object lesson in The Way Not To Do It.

Which was why I was also working on other unrelated novels… But anyway, I just felt that should get a response. Because yes! as always, the correct answer to any worries about writing is generally, write more, but in this specific case, it can safely be said that I did try that one. It might be time for me to attempt something else, like maybe supportive beta readers or like, somebody with some concept of how an edit ought to work, but those aren’t things I know much about and I’ve been so alone for so long.

This is the novel, in fact, that taught me the valuable life lesson that Nobody Cares About Your Novel, now that I contemplate it, so. I mean, there’s some scar tissue here. I’m working through it.

But yes, I’m fully aware, you gotta write a lot of shit before you write anything you’ll like, and in fact, I’ve done so.

(Actually I’m within 10,000 words of having published two million words on AO3 since I got an account there in 2012, now that I look. I think of the million as a benchmark because I remember a Neil Gaiman quote about something about writing a million words before finding one you like, and that was when I tallied up my words on the various drafts of this novel and came up with something over the million mark, so. At any rate, his advice was practice, and I’ve done that!)