Friday, September 4, 2009

Passive-Aggressive Hell

My rhino of revision is really enjoying himself this week...

Ok, I should backtrack before I continue with that thought. I've sort of nicknamed my writing process. Though my actual drafting and revising process follows Jennifer's, I have affectionately given the writing and revising stages totem animals. My writing stage has a writing monkey. I think this is because when I write I like to have total abandon. I like to be able to throw all my (literary) shit (ideas) around and take chances-- because sometimes the shit will stick. My revision stage has a Revising Rhino. My rhino bounds across my novel, ruthless, getting the plot into order, fixing massive continuity gaps and in general intimidating all my bad writing while protecting the small nuggets that are worth salvaging. My rhino is fearless, but fierce-- I am slightly terrified of him.

This week I'm finishing up my first read through. My draft is very rough. I've got some really lovely scenes and a plot that crumbles in the beginning and then smashes together at the end. I'm thrilled to finally be getting to the end of what has been (for me) an intolerable step in my writing process. I hate re-reading what I've written, because that's when my passive-aggressive streak takes over. My writing doubts for this week: my main character is annoying, my plot is not as original as I thought it was, someone else has written a better book on this topic, omg--did I seriously spend eight months working on this? it's awful.

So, I've spent most of my time convincing myself all first drafts are awful and that the only way to go from here is up. I'm looking forward to this week's challenge-- re-plotting and re-writing scenes that don't work. I feel more proactive and hopefully this will keep my inner passive-aggressive streak at bay.

So, spill it, do any of your suffer a passive-aggressive streak as you revise? Are these doubts normal? Or should I seriously consider another profession?

1 comment:

  1. Oh my, yes. As I write, as I read through, as I revise, when I send to betas, when I revise again, when I send to my agent (especially then), and then 6 months later, when I've been working on something new and I decide, in a moment of idle procrastination, to read over that old MS. I swing between love and hate often, sometimes in the course of a single day.

    Doubt is part of the process. Embrace the neuroses. Be one with the neuroses. :-)

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