the art of writing

There's great joy in figuring out why something doesn't work. For example, take the following sentence: "She stretched, eyes flying open when pain shot through her right leg." This sentence fails as a narrative sentence. The immediacy of pain is lost. She would stretch, and there would be pain. And then, if you really care, her eyes may fly open at that, but by that point, I think that's the least of her concerns. The sentence must convey the immediacy of the pain, so the order must go from stretch to pain instantly without the padding of an exterior reaction. In any case, it was a good thing to realize, and now that sentence has been scrapped completely. Edit: Actually, I came up with something only marginally better, which I excuse by reducing the importance of pain. Huh.

Which just goes to show that everything I write must be re-written for it to be much good. I was thinking on my drive home that for this thing (novel? novel-thing? I hesitate to call it anything so ambitious while I am only on chapter 3. Maybe I should refer to it as this Thing, capitalized), I've been having to do so much re-writing. And that made me think of all the levels of writing I engage in. Like the lowest level writing is when I don't know what's going on and can't connect with the characters or engage in any semblence of plot or plausible interaction. In that case, the writing is usually a jumble of dialogue from the characters going, "Hey, I want to be more unbalanced, Storygoddess," and "Why don't you give me better lines, Storygoddess?" and so on.

And then the next level up is when I have a vague, general idea of what I want happening, so I sketch out the basic actions and dialogue. It's like a key animator who draws up key frame A and key frame B for a motion sequence, A being where the motion starts and B being where the motion ends. The next level up after that is like me doing the inbetweener work, where I have to draw each motion frame to get from frame A to frame B. This really requires immersion into the story, where as the lower levels didn't. Unfortunately, most of the time the writing on this level is still poor, and the immersion is not quite enough. Things may still be out of character, and even key frames may still be changed.

So then you go up to the highest basic level, which is essentially another immersion into the story. You re-write everything, think of pleasing ways to phrase and depict things, and you're there, right in the story, right in your character's heads, and everything makes sense. You realize that your previous immersion wasn't enough, and you realize, this is it. This is right. Maybe it's like ascending to the director's position and putting everything into place and overseeing the whole thing.

During the whole process, particularly the highest stage, is a lot of head banging as you dissect every sentence and every phrase, every word choice, until you are satisfied. Or tired and apathetic. Or best of all, until your brain has turned to mush from too much abuse and you can't figure out if what you wrote was any good or not. Then you put it aside or send it to someone to read and tell you if you failed magificently or miserably.

Edit: Re-thinking it, I think it goes from total disconnect to director to key animator to inbetweener to everything all at once, which is why the highest basic stage is what it is.

I suppose I will stop procrastinating now and actually go write.