Posts tagged the process

laurensfield:

And repeat.

Yes, exactly.

*sigh*

(Source: laurennotjordan, via theslylink)

lazybookreviews:

A reader correctly shares his frustration with us:

“Looked up the GQ site a few days ago (there was a piece by Alex Pappademas about Winona Ryder whom I think I’d forgive anything, never mind shoplifting) and encountered this sentence concerning her role in Black Swan:  “The character … is a wreck who embodies … everything the movie has to say about the terrible toll performance extracts from young women.”  

http://www.gq.com/entertainment/celebrities/201101/winona-ryder-forever-black-swan-star-trek (5th paragraph)

And that reminded me that I’ve seen phrases such as “extracted his revenge” or extracted vengeance from” here and there over the past year or two. What?  ’Exact’ can’t be a verb anymore?  Vengeance and Terrible Tolls are Exacted upon folks.  The spreading semi-literacy of the age is exacting too high a price, no?”

Now, I say “amazeballs,” because it is The Parlance of Our Times, but I agree, it is beyond the pale to say “extracted his revenge.”

Prove him wrong with better writing, Alex Pappademas.

Yes, yes, yes!

I’ve spent some of the afternoon working on more letter-poems, and I have a habit of working in email with them (for reasons I don’t care to explain). It became abundantly clear just how bad of an idea that was when Firefox decided to crash just now, and I lost the entirety of a poem to the ether.

This is why one should have OCD about the save function, my friends.

Oy.

My mantra in a nutshell.

(Source: papercrushed, via )

juan-o replied to your post: In the Woods

A comic artist told me we have to draw 2000 crappy pages before the good ones start coming out so I should just be happy every time I do a crappy page because that means I’m a page closer to the good ones. Apply that to writing ;)

Thank you. That’s very good advice. :)

I do thoroughly believe that writing, like art, is a process, and thus the crappy is a natural part of that. That is sort of the point of this morning poetry journal thing anyway — to just keep writing, whether it’s crappy or not, to just get words onto the page.

I think my current rejection of that process has as much, if not more, to do with various frustrations in my personal life. My novel is not going well, and I don’t know what to do about it. My office computer keeps spontaneously shutting off, making a sometimes bothersome job into something that makes me want to pull my hair out. My parents’ divorce continues to kick up bouts of emotional turmoil in everyone around me. My best friend is going through incredible stress and I can’t help but feel it with her.

And so on.

All the mucky-muck is infecting my writing or desire to write. And in many ways I think the need to scribble and be incoherent is a way of expressing all that stress and frustration. Heh.

But I’ll keep writing, keep pumping out those 2000 crappy poems or stories or pages or whatever, because really, there’s nothing else I can do. I wouldn’t be me without the words.

Last night, after doing some sketching, I tried to put some words down on the page. Normally, I write something down and, whether its good or not, I just keep going. but last night, I just couldn’t stand what I was writing, so I started scribbling violently all over the page.

It doesn’t happen very often that I react so strongly to my own writing. Not that everything I write is good — far from it — but that I understand that crappy drafts are a natural part of the writing process. Last night, I just couldn’t take my own words. As soon as I put them down on the page, I had to get rid of them. If I hadn’t scratched them out, I would have torn out the page.

I tried to write something down this morning and got the same result. It was NOT coming together, and I couldn’t force myself to keep going through the crappy draft to get to the good. It was just bad and so again, I crossed it out.

This kind of thing happens sometimes. (This is probably tied to my frustrations around the novel I’m supposed to be working on this month.) I will keep writing of course, even though I may end up with more pages like these, because I know this feeling of frustration is temporary. I’ll pull out of it. I always do.

So I’ll keep writing and keep writing, and eventually I get to open fields of words again, but right now, stuck in the muck of the forest is where I am.

[ETA: This was cross-posted to my website. If you feel inclined, you can comment either here or there.]