Just wanted to speak a little bit about one of the issues that I have personally as a writer. I think this is also an issue with the internet as a whole but I will get to that.
I have been trained as a writer to revise, revise, revise and edit, edit, edit. Obviously this is because we want to remove all the obvious mistakes in the piece, and this in of itself is a useful skill to have. However a writer like myself can endlessly tinker with his/her words.
As a Journalism Professor of mine once said "Writers don't finish a work, they abandon them." I think there is a lot of truth to this, which is why deadlines can be very useful to a writer.
I started writing silly fiction back in gradeschool. I had this great idea for a sci-fi story about two people on opposite sides of a war overcoming their differences and saving the world or something like that. At the time I felt this was a fantastically innovative idea, and I had a great innovative title "Space Wars." I don't think I was even 10 at the time, so forgive me. Thankfully, that story has been lost due to the failure of the Macintosh IIe it was written on. That story however was the beginning of a great many stories that I never finished.
Part of me thought that I shouldn't finish those works mainly because I didn't think my skills were enough to do the stories I had in my head justice. So I kept working on my writing through Middle School, through High School, through College. Trying to learn what made good writing.
Well I am post grad now and I still have no idea what good writing is. From a lot of my writing classes in college I was led to believe there is no creative ideas anymore, and that all I could do was deconstruct existing ideas. While that idea in of itself is not bad, the whole idea of deconstructing existing tropes and ideas is becoming more and more of trope of itself. Also for every excellent deconstruction of an idea, we get dozens of other stories which are cut and paste masquerading as art. I even had a professor who encouraged outright plagarism.
So I waited all this time to get the skills to write the stories I wanted and now I am told that my ideas are cliche.
Sadly a lot of school, even in creative endeavors, is trying to figure out what your instructor wants, and while I was in College I managed to finish a great many short stories. All of them attempts at seeming like whacky post-modern writing while trying to keep to the old structures I held dear.
Now to clarify the "old structures" I refer to very much come from the heroic journey as outlined by Joseph Campbell. I didn't know this at the time and it wasn't until the middle of my college career that I realized how much I loved the ideas of heroes, and being thrown out of your element to realize a truth and bring it back to your world. Those stories, no matter how cliche resonate deeply inside me.
Back to my college writing days, I finished a great many stories. I felt like I could continue with them but the all important deadline stopped me forcing me to end a piece. I wasn't always satisfied with the ending but I had a piece with a beginning, middle, and end. That in itself is a great feeling to have.
The issue now with the internet and my lack of structure in my writing is that I am back to the endless tinkering with my work. So the only response I can think of is to write and post without letting myself tinker too much. The problem with this is that sometimes my work is not what I want it to be and is often unfiltered, sometimes illegible. However it is important that I get the words out there warts and all, I can tinker later. To finish a story longer than the usual twenty page limit that a usual creative assignment implements.
However now I am just throwing my unfiltered mess into the pool that is the internet, and it is scrambling to be seen among all the others.
Every writer has to at some point get over the fact that they think their work is worthless. So throwing it up helps with that, and my compromise is that I will come back after the work is done and tinker more, simply to make it clearer.
I think an issue with the internet is the temptation not to go back and fix. The words are already out there so why bother fixing and reposting. In the end I guess that is my challenge to myself, not to let half-finished things simply fall into the mess that is the internet but use this blog as a vehicle to keep me writing and keep me improving.
Anyway I feel as though I may have rambled a bit, but sometimes unfiltered is okay, at least I have put something up for today.
