I noticed something the other day when I went to write in Genesis Earth after a long hiatus. I reread the last few pages I’d written…and reading the story, it seemed a lot different to me than when I was writing it.
The same thing happened to me when I started rereading The Lost Colony. It felt melodramatic, wordy, and at parts really cheesy. Is this the same story that I sat down and wrote just a few months ago? It seems like something completely different.
It’s scary, because it makes me realize that when you write a story, you really DON’T have a lot of control over it…
Not that I don’t think that The Lost Colony or Genesis Earth aren’t fixable. They are. I’m a discovery writer, which means that I have to write myself into a story, so I expected that I’d have to cut a lot out of the story to make it work. That’s not a problem.
The problem is that when you’re writing a scene and you think it has a certain feel to it, how do you know you aren’t just deluding yourself? Is the sense of control that you have over your story just an illusion? How can you pick up on the things that readers will notice as you’re writing the story itself?
I guess you just have to get your first draft out and fix it all in the rewrites. The first draft is to get the overall story worked out, and the rewriting is for getting in really close and fixing all of the problems that you ignored / were ignorant of in the initial draft.
I’m writing Genesis Earth, and I think I understand one of the characters–Terra, the main character’s partner in the mission–but looking back over the past few days, I don’t think that I do. Her actions are confusing, her motivations are contradictory. It’s just not working.
Part of that is because I’m not writing consistently out here. If I were, I think I’d get her better. Like I said, I’m a discovery writer, so I have to spend a lot of time with a character before I understand them. Maybe I should push myself to write more.
Or maybe I should just spend some time writing about the character, instead of writing myself into the character. That sounds like an interesting experiment. I’ll write a post on this blog that is all about this character–who she is, where she’s coming from, what are her fears, her needs, her desires and motivations, what is her personality like, etc.
The thing that I’m really worried about (besides the thought that perhaps the control I have over my stories is just an illusion) is that the thoughts, feelings, and ideas that I’ve had that made me create this character in my head in the first place are slowly fading away. I’ve drawn up this character from a number of thoughts and struggles I’ve had in my life in the past several months, but…because I haven’t written down any of these ideas (I HATE outlining), they are fading out of my memory. If they do, what am I going to be left with to construct this character?
This is where a journal would come in handy. And I’ve been keeping one–a personal one, not just my travel blog–but…not that faithfully. And the one I was keeping faithfully back when I had a lot of my thoughts for this character, it was lost when my flash drive crashed. :'(
I’ll do the best I can. And honestly, the best I can do is probably to allow this first draft to suck. I don’t know how many times I’ve rewritten this story from the beginning, without even having finished it. That’s just lame.
