Category: On Writing

When writing, I try not to look back. I try to forge ahead despite the typos and wrong words that are typed in the sentences. There’s an urge to go back and correct things, to add a comma or period here there, or to fill in the missing words that will complete the sentences. But I ignore the errors for the sake of putting all of my thoughts down, to keep the flow going.

The flow is the important part. Writing requires quantity of words, and without them, there’s little to edit. To increase the word count, I have to keep writing no matter what, because if I stop to correct things, I’ll lose the momentum, lose the flow that allowed my brain to crank out ideas in quick succession.

It’s tough though. There are times when I want to go back to the last sentence to add more. Go back to the last paragraph and tidy things up. But that can be done later. That can be done after everything’s been written down, and it’s time to edit.

When I can’t make progress on a story for one reason or another, it’s like I’ve run into a roadblock. Despite having a lot of great ideas for it and that I’ve planned it out, I can’t make progress on it. It’s as if writing the story has been hindered by an unseeable force, causing me to struggle each time I try to add a sentence to it.

Sometimes that roadblock can happen a day after a great writing session. It’s like the story has just decided to quit, and I don’t know how to keep the story going. The roadblock happened out of nowhere, and now I’m completely baffled by the situation.

To overcome this, I usually have to wait–give it time for the roadblock to disappear. At other times, I’ll try taking the story in a new direction–a direction that offers new twists and turns to keep my interest piqued in the story. Or I might put the story aside and work on a new story altogether.

Surprisingly enough, after a few weeks or months, that story that I had put aside will read like new to me, and I’ll be excited to work on it again.

One aspect that I enjoy about writing is adding details. Details can give a scene realism and paint a picture in the reader’s mind of the environment. They provide an added layer of depth that makes the scene and characters stand out.

But details can be overdone, and when they are, it can be tiring to read through. It’s like reading a passage with a bunch of superfluous and ornate words, and by the time you get through it, you wonder what you just read. The same can happen with an overabundance of details. The long list of details make it seem like everything that was described was important, but at the expense of exhausting the reader’s memory and patience.

For me, adding details give more depth to a story and the characters (such as their backstory), and it helps the reader to visualize the events that are taking place. But when the details pile up to the point that there are too many things to remember, it can have the opposite effect that was intended.

When I don’t know where to start on a writing project, I’ll begin to put some ideas down like I’m brainstorming or just listing things out. Even though it’s not intended to be part of the first draft, it will get me thinking about the ideas that I currently have for the project and how I want to include them.

If I write long enough, I’ll start exploring ideas that I hadn’t originally thought of. I’ll get into specifics of those ideas, and clarify concepts that were more like rough sketches at first than the blueprint of what I wanted to create.

At some point, the writing process will take on a life of its own, and it will direct itself as if it knows where to go. Sometimes, we just need to start writing to get a project started rather than to endlessly think about it until it’s perfect in our minds. Even if we don’t know the entire blueprint for an idea, writing helps us to discover it, and to bring it to life.

Writing goals can be about creating a certain kind of world or story, writing in a certain genre, or even writing about specific kinds of characters. But writing goals can also be about the craft of writing itself. For example, they can be about writing so many words a day (i.e. a word count goal), or to finish a chapter by a particular date, or to write on a prompt that is intended just to get us writing.

Ultimately, writing goals are a discipline. It’s kind of like an exercise where one must do it regularly to keep one’s skill and strength in peak condition. If writing isn’t done regularly, it can be hard to return to it after a week or a month long absence. When we do return to writing, it’ll be harder to write at the same level of intensity and output as before. To be disciplined about writing, we need to write even when we’re not in the mood to write, or if we’re tired. The bottom line is, we just need to write.

I usually only have a word count goal if I’m writing a novel or a short story, but that goal is tentative, since I’ll go over it if I’m really engaged in the story. But it’s not the word count that matters so much as the act of writing itself. Getting started–putting my thoughts down on paper (or the computer) for a few minutes–that’s the most important thing. Once I get into a routine, it becomes easy to pour my thoughts on to the page. And once I get that going, it becomes easier to write, and all the rest will follow: the word count, writing a story in a genre I want to tell, etc.

Even if I’m tired or I’m not the mood to write, the act of writing will revitalize me with zeal and energy. The ideas will come flowing from my mind to my fingertips, and I’m continuously thinking about the story or the blog post that I’m writing about. It’s like I’m having an inner dialogue with myself, talking back and forth about what my thoughts are on a story or topic. I’m utilizing that chamber of my mind that likes to debate and inquiry and hammer out ideas. It becomes my voice as I write–one that has stayed quiet throughout most of the day until I’ve awakened it from its slumber.

It’s frustrating to be stuck on a sentence while editing. It’s as if everything else is fine except this one sentence that needs to be changed. Even when we rewrite it, it still doesn’t sound right. Maybe it’s the choice of words. Maybe it doesn’t flow from the previous sentence. Or maybe it just doesn’t fit in the paragraph.

Being stuck on a sentence can disrupt the momentum of the editing process. It can bog us down, drain our concentration and focus. If we get stuck for too long, we can lose motivation to edit the rest of the piece. It was as if this one thing–as small and minor as it seemed–kept us from finishing a work we had spent hours on.

Whenever I get stuck on a sentence, I’ll try to fix it for awhile, and if I’m still not satisfied with the corrections, I’ll move on to the next sentence. When I come back to editing the part that I was stuck at, the solution will come to me right away as if all it needed was for me to step away.

It’s always an eyeopening experience to edit older stories. For one, I will discover ideas that I had long forgotten about. Aside from polishing the punctuation, grammar, and word choice, the stories are written in such a way that they made sense at the time that they were written, but as they stand now, it’s clear what ideas work and which ones don’t.

When I edit older stories, I usually add more layers to it, and clarify scenes, and improve the dialogue. In some cases, I’ll change the ending if the current one doesn’t match the theme I want it to convey. Often times, the story will increase in word count as I add details that I didn’t notice were missing before. Sure, I’ll cut out a lot of stuff too, but compared to what I add, it’s usually less.

There’s rarely a case when I’ll reread something I wrote and not find something that I’d want to fix or change. As I read more books and write more stories, I continually expand upon my knowledge and sense of what sounds right or doesn’t sound right when it comes to editing. It’s not just about correcting the technical aspects, such as punctuation and grammar, but in enhancing the elements that come with an awareness of what is effective, consistent, and plausible in terms of characters, dialogue, and the narrative sequence of a story.

As I continue editing the short stories that I wrote months ago, I realize that the time that has past has allowed me to see them in a new light. Details and insights that I wasn’t aware of before suddenly come to the forefront of my mind. Word choices that sounded sufficient when I wrote them are replaced with better word choices today.

This process has made me realize that any work or story we revisit can be improved and modified ad infinitum. If we give ourselves enough distance from something, the experiences that we’ve gathered upon our next edit will give us a new perspective on our work. In theory, we’re never really finished with something until we decide to say it is. And that usually happens when we’re ready to move on to the next project.

I was editing a short story I had written several months ago, and it was like returning to and completing a project I had left unfinished. The story was familiar, and I knew what it was about, but it didn’t have the impact and clarity I thought it had when I first wrote it.

So I began to edit it, fixing the glaring errors I hadn’t spotted before, deleting sentences and words, and adding details that I didn’t realize was missing. After I edited the story several times, I read through it again. The story was essentially the same, but it had a flow that it didn’t have before. It was kind of like pulling out the weeds from a garden, and seeing the garden for what it should be.

When we write our first draft, it can be an exhilarating experience. As we write, all of our ideas come pouring out onto the page, seamlessly flowing like a rapid river stream.

But when it comes to editing our work, the task can be tedious, even exhausting. At first, we change a few things here and there, but as we spend more time on it, we begin to focus on the details, whether they are in the story or in the grammar or style of our writing.

But even after everything is fixed, new errors begin to appear out of nowhere. We fix those, patch them up, rewrite sentences and paragraphs, and then after that’s done, new errors appear again! (It’s as if our manuscript is conspiring against us to edit it until we go mad) An endless cycle of edits, indeed.

It seems that we’ll never be done with our manuscript, and we’ll have to spend countless days and weeks to finish it. Each time we read it, the story takes on a new appearance–a new identity. At some point, we might just have to accept the manuscript for what it is. Besides, perfection is only in the mind, not what is out there. Or maybe we just need to edit it to the point that the errors don’t exist in our mind anymore.