Writing reflections
Nov. 8th, 2021 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkLast night, I wound up rereading one of my old stories that I had written in college, almost ten years ago.
And...it sucked.
It was a little under 25,000 words. There was the skeleton of an interesting story there, but I could tell I was in the phase when I was still struggling to learn how to plot, and more significantly, my writing itself sucked. The dialogue was awful, the descriptions minimal and the transitions nonexistent.
A normal person would probably look at their past sucky writing and think, "Wow, I'm so glad I improved!"
My imposter-syndrome'd self looked at my past writing and thought, "Did I really improve since then, or have I just been conning most people into thinking I'm a better writer now?"
Something that became very obvious to me, as I was reading my past work, is how I struggle with writing because I'm neurodivergent. My brain is wired so that I am not great at translating what is in my head into words on a page, because I constantly forget that someone else reading what I write doesn't have the same context in their head that I do. So the result is that I'm a perpetual underwriter.
Another aspect that became obvious to me? The whole echolalia aspect of being autistic. I was literally reading dialogue I wrote that didn't sound all that natural coming out of my characters' mouths, because the word choice came from reproducing random bits of dialogue I'd gathered from other people over the course of my life.
And, you know...I am still insecure about my writing, sometimes.
I have gotten reviews on both of my small-press-published books that said I'm a terrible writer. I mean, those comments are a tiny minority of the reviews I've received, but still...that always hits hard.
I've worked on my dialogue. I think I'm much better now than I used to be. But it's still something I'm constantly rewriting and refining.
I'm not, by nature, a poetic writer. I have trouble visualizing settings sometimes (and don't even ask me to visualize my characters' faces). I'm still a natural underwriter whose editing process makes my stories grow up to 10,000 words. At the same time, I'm sometimes overly wordy when constructing sentences, using too many filler words.
It doesn't help that the publishing industry is so competitive, you're often made to feel like you can't get an agent or book deal unless you're a perfect, literary writer.
But so much of the drafting process is confronting those fears and figuring out how to put them aside. Telling myself that I'll always be able to edit and improve my writing later. Otherwise, I'd be paralyzed by my fears and never be able to type a single word.
One step at a time.
And...it sucked.
It was a little under 25,000 words. There was the skeleton of an interesting story there, but I could tell I was in the phase when I was still struggling to learn how to plot, and more significantly, my writing itself sucked. The dialogue was awful, the descriptions minimal and the transitions nonexistent.
A normal person would probably look at their past sucky writing and think, "Wow, I'm so glad I improved!"
My imposter-syndrome'd self looked at my past writing and thought, "Did I really improve since then, or have I just been conning most people into thinking I'm a better writer now?"
Something that became very obvious to me, as I was reading my past work, is how I struggle with writing because I'm neurodivergent. My brain is wired so that I am not great at translating what is in my head into words on a page, because I constantly forget that someone else reading what I write doesn't have the same context in their head that I do. So the result is that I'm a perpetual underwriter.
Another aspect that became obvious to me? The whole echolalia aspect of being autistic. I was literally reading dialogue I wrote that didn't sound all that natural coming out of my characters' mouths, because the word choice came from reproducing random bits of dialogue I'd gathered from other people over the course of my life.
And, you know...I am still insecure about my writing, sometimes.
I have gotten reviews on both of my small-press-published books that said I'm a terrible writer. I mean, those comments are a tiny minority of the reviews I've received, but still...that always hits hard.
I've worked on my dialogue. I think I'm much better now than I used to be. But it's still something I'm constantly rewriting and refining.
I'm not, by nature, a poetic writer. I have trouble visualizing settings sometimes (and don't even ask me to visualize my characters' faces). I'm still a natural underwriter whose editing process makes my stories grow up to 10,000 words. At the same time, I'm sometimes overly wordy when constructing sentences, using too many filler words.
It doesn't help that the publishing industry is so competitive, you're often made to feel like you can't get an agent or book deal unless you're a perfect, literary writer.
But so much of the drafting process is confronting those fears and figuring out how to put them aside. Telling myself that I'll always be able to edit and improve my writing later. Otherwise, I'd be paralyzed by my fears and never be able to type a single word.
One step at a time.
