(i have to say, it’s a little daunting writing a post to follow “sibling rivalry” – have mercy, old friends :)
i’ve been working on writing a short story for a couple of months now, and at last i finished it. well, that is to say, i finished the first few drafts. you can’t really call a piece of work “done” after the first draft; after the second or third,though, i’m willing to say i’ve finished writing and am now revising it.
draft 1 took a long time to finish. i had the idea for the story clearly in my head for a long time, but it never seemed to materialize onto paper. some of the credit for finally finishing it has to go to a songwriting friend of mine who sent me a message one night that said he had completed 2 new songs. which of course made me jealous and left me feeling somewhat as though i had been beaten at my own game. so i sat down and finished draft 1 the next day.
translating ideas into words (draft 1) is never easy – but it’s also never pretty, so draft 2 always reminds me of plastic surgery and cosmetology. the basic bone structure usually needs altering, and then the light and coloring also need a lot of work. draft 2 took time: trying to read as if i had not written it, paying keen attention to every nagging feeling, no matter how slight, that a certain word or phrase did not quite work. revising, rethinking, re-aiming, re-everything-ing. but at last draft 2 was done.
at that point (after draft 2 is done), i always find it best to leave the story alone for a while. let the echo of the phrases die down a bit, let my mind recover from the familiarity of the story’s ebb and flow. in college, a professor of mine called it the “two-weeks-in-a-drawer” period, which means you stick the story in a drawer and forget about it for two weeks.
i didn’t leave it alone quite that long, but i gave myself some distance before i picked it up again. draft 3 was mostly wordplay, more tweaking than anything else (though there was quite a lot of tweaking on this particular story). and when that was done, i felt pretty happy with it overall, so i sent it out to a few select friends.
picking the first readers is always tricky for me. i like to send it to people i know really well, people i trust, and people i know love me. because chances are, they are going to come back and tell me all the things that are wrong with the story, and i know i’ve gotta be able to take the comments objectively. it’s a hard truth but you cannot argue with your critics when it comes to creative writing. if they say something is confusing, then it was confusing; it may not be to you or to everyone, but it is that to at least one reader. if they say it’s cheesy, unrealistic, boring, dense or complicated — you have to take it all in stride. so i sent draft 3 to a few close, literary friends of mine… and to one or two that i knew would just read it and like it. no harm in stacking the deck a little.
it’s a funny thing, then, after the first draft goes out — i’m always filled with this overwhelming sense of mortification. i’m utterly embarrassed to have sent such rubbish out, can’t believe my own arrogant foolhardiness at even attempting to credit such writing, and live in a faint sense of terror until i hear back from everyone.
hearing back from the first person is the hardest. because then you think everyone else must feel the same way they felt, and i’m always even more embarrassed that i sent something so clearly flawed, and i always wish i could sneak into everyone’s emails and take back my story. the second and third replies come in to balance it out, and at that point, i find i’m able to pull constructive criticism out from it all. (the worst is, of course, when they don’t read the story at all – as if to say it wasn’t necessarily bad, just phenomenally boring. that always takes the most out of me.)
after years of this maddening process, i’ve gotten used to asking certain people for their opinion and can take their criticism (as brutal as it might be, though it often isn’t – even when being critical, most people are quite nice) without flinching.
and then there is draft 4. the mending. all the comments and criticism come back, and the mending begins. when i was younger, i spent more time mending my ego than the text at this point, but as i’ve gotten older, i’ve gotten better at separating my person from the criticism (particularly because the text is so much easier to fix than my person :).
and so i am mending now, mending, mending, mending draft 4. perhaps draft 5 will be presentable, perhaps draft 6.
sometimes i think the trickiest part of the whole process is loving the story, despite its flawed drafty forms, as much as i once loved the vague idea in my head.
