I am a far better judge at how I am at music than at writing. With music, I can tell if the music flows right, or if the technical aspects are where I want them to be. Style can be a bit weird. I have no idea what people listen to, and I play music in the style I grew up listening to, not the style I listen to now, so I definitely play for me.
With writing, it’s harder for me to tell if I’m reading between the lines, or if I skipped a step and didn’t put what I was thinking about down on paper. I can’t tell if I captured everything I wanted to capture.
One thing regarding writing advice that I have to personally attest to is the comment that “you have your million words of shitty writing to work through before you can get to be decent, and then you have another million words of decent to get through before you get to be good.” I know that I look back at my earlier stuff that I was so proud of and just cringe.
Or, to put it another way, there’s an apocryphal tale of a pottery class; the teacher tells everyone the first day that they have a choice–they can sign up to be graded by quantity of what they make, regardless of quality, or by quality, regardless of quantity. So the class quickly splits into two halves–one group just throwing clay onto the potter’s wheel and making crap, knowing that they’ll just be graded by the combined weight of their intact pieces, and one group trying to make a singular masterpiece.
The ones trying to make the singular masterpiece end up being so afraid of trying that they just end up staring at the clay, afraid to try anything that might affect their grade, while the ones just throwing crap into the kiln… started getting better and better.
The professor calls it to a halt after a week, his point made, and gets the class going properly.
What works for me isn’t “Write something for you,” it’s “Write the truth.”
By “truth,” I’m not referring to the plot, I’m referring to the theme.
My honest belief is that, while there are bad actions, there are no bad people. And so I write my “bad guys” as people whose decisions, while still called out as being utterly wrong, are done for reasons that make sense given the character’s backstory.
I sincerely believe that no one is beyond redemption, so I write about bad guys seeing the light and becoming good guys (or, at least, less-bad guys). And I believe that change needs to come from the inside, so I don’t write about convincing, but about being convinced.
When I found something I wanted to say, a truth I wanted to convey, and found time to sit down and write it, the words flowed from me remarkably easily.
For anyone in this thread that has expressed interest. I have decided to try spinning off discussion of a writing group into another discussion. I am open to suggestions because I am terrified this will end the same as most attempts do. Voiced interest then come time to do support melts.
So opleaw, anyone who has ideas or interest speak up. I have no clue what I am doing.
