# On being careful and being thoughtful



## M. LeRenard (Nov 29, 2012)

I'll be honest; I've been in a bit of a writing rut for some time now.  At some point, I hit that stage where I knew I was producing marginally good quality material, but there was something of a wall there that I couldn't seem to get over, to start pushing my stuff into that realm that people like to call "memorable", or at the very least, "smart".
But in the meantime, as I go through this PhD program, I'm being taught how to write scientific papers.  Now, one would assume, naively, that science writing is totally 100% different from fiction writing.  That's kind of what I thought for a while there, myself.  Obviously, this thought is leading up the inevitable "but it turns out that's not true" statement.
You see, in science writing, you have to be clear, concise, organized, and you have to cover all your bases, proving to the reader that you put in a lot of thought, the right kinds of thought, and in the right order to get the most reasonable answer you could have possibly gotten.  You have to direct the reader through your process so he can understand what you did and how you came to the conclusions you came to, and you have to point out to the reader any holes you're aware of so that he knows you thought about those too.  So you'd think this type of writing lends itself perfectly to a very dry, dull, boring, and inhuman style.  And it totally does, but that's totally not how you should ever write a scientific paper.
In science as in all other forms of writing, what the reader is really looking for is a narrative, a story.  It is so much easier to follow a paper if it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  We have a problem we're trying to solve; we did this to solve it; here are the results, and here's what it means.  People love a good mystery story with a satisfying ending, and in some ways that's what every good science article should aspire to be.  If you just chuck a bunch of graphs all over the place and talk about them at random, you'll lose the concept and you'll lose the reader and people will say you're a terrible writer.  You've got to tell a story.

But there's no reason fiction can't learn from science writing, either.  In fact, the one thing that's most important in science writing is something that fiction authors really need to put some time into learning as well, I think.  This is, be careful and be thoughtful!
Like I said up above, in science writing you've got to convince your audience that you know what you're talking about and haven't taken any bad shortcuts, and that means that every time you write a sentence, you go back and you ask yourself, "Is that true?  Is that relevant?  Do I need to cite any source for that statement?"  The point I'm making is that in fiction writing, you should do exactly the same thing (minus the citing sources part... although you can if you really want to).  You want your audience to buy what you're selling them, you've got to convince them what you're selling is the best you've got.  No shortcuts, no skimping on the ingredients, no diluting with bullshit.  Critique groups become your peer review; if people feel you really missed something, you go back and you fix it and submit it again.

So this brings me back to my writing rut; this feels like a discovery to me.  I think this is the path to truly remarkable writing, and I think if I really practiced it I could make it work for my own fiction.  Of course, it does have a huge problem: writing this way takes FOREVER.
The last scientific piece I wrote was for a class project.  The paper ended up being around 3500 words.  It took over 9 hours to write, and then probably another 10 or 12 hours to edit.  So that's basically 20 hours of work to produce 3500 words.  And I only finished it that quickly because we had a deadline.
Now, granted, most of the time was spent looking up sources for things, but even so... when you consider that a short novel is generally in the ~100,000 word range, imagine just how long it takes to write something with that level of care that's that long a piece.  I think this is something that can come more easily with practice, but I also think there's an asymptotic limit.  In other words, no matter your skill level, you try writing this way and you're in for the long haul.
BUT: it's an exciting idea, isn't it?  All you need is a clear idea and a shitload of time, and you could produce a masterpiece of fiction that even the douchebags at the New Yorker could appreciate.  So it's inspired me a little.  I want to try writing a short story scientifically and see what I can do with it, see if I can't produce something worthwhile, and if I can, I'm going to take that new skill and apply it to my old novel and polish that baby up until it shines.  I feel like I just might have discovered a way over that wall.

I guess that's all I got.  So what all methods have you guys used to produce things you're proud of?


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## SkyeLansing (Nov 29, 2012)

My 'bad' habit is to write everything initially.  And I mean everything.  I will say someone does something then say why they did it.  Unnecessary dialogue and all kinds of other stuff too.  In editing a lot of this gets cut down now.

It makes for horrible reading in early drafts, but I think it is actually helpful because it makes me know what the characters are doing and more importantly WHY.  Then when I go back through I can remove this stuff and replace it with subtler cues that give the same information without beating the reader over the head with it.  This significantly improves how things read, and even better lets the reader figure out on their own why people are behaving as they do and draw their own conclusions.  This allows them to participate in the story in a way, involving their own imagination, and since it is now partly theirs my hope is they are more likely to stick through the story.


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## sunandshadow (Nov 29, 2012)

Interesting that this turned out to be pro-carefulness.  I was expecting a sentiment along the lines of "trying to be careful with the first draft causes writer's block" because I've heard that so often.  I don't personally have an opinion on whether carefulness is good or bad because I've felt the joy of a really tightly-written scene where everything just flows beautifully with logic and 'emotional metabolism', but I've also felt the fear of not wanting to write something I might have to delete later, or worse make an inconsistent mess that can't even be edited into something coherent and organized.  Given that the first draft is where I tend to get stuck, for me personally it's probably wise to offload anything difficult or questionable to after the first draft.



> All you need is a clear idea


How do you get a clear idea, anyway?

Methods I've used to produce things I'm proud of, hmm.  That's a more difficult question than it seems.  I've produced things I'm proud of with the same methods that have produced things I'm not proud of.  I've produced both good and bad results by both careful planning and spontaneously throwing ink at paper.  I kind of think the potential for a piece to become something I'm proud of is there in the initial concept if it's going to be there at all.  So yeah, having a clear idea (which is a good idea with the potential to become something I'm proud of) is the true problem.  I'm usually blocked from creating something I can be proud of by missing pieces of that idea, or weak pieces in a complete idea.


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## sunandshadow (Nov 29, 2012)

SkyeLansing said:


> My 'bad' habit is to write everything initially.  And I mean everything.  I will say someone does something then say why they did it.  Unnecessary dialogue and all kinds of other stuff too.  In editing a lot of this gets cut down now.
> 
> It makes for horrible reading in early drafts, but I think it is actually helpful because it makes me know what the characters are doing and more importantly WHY.  Then when I go back through I can remove this stuff and replace it with subtler cues that give the same information without beating the reader over the head with it.  This significantly improves how things read, and even better lets the reader figure out on their own why people are behaving as they do and draw their own conclusions.  This allows them to participate in the story in a way, involving their own imagination, and since it is now partly theirs my hope is they are more likely to stick through the story.


Sounds like a good method to me.  I often write two or three paragraphs of unreadable infodump at the beginning of a project, to get my mind into the story.  Later I remove that from weighing down the beginning, chop it up, and work it in throughout the story where it fits more naturally, discarding the bits that have turned out to be completely irrelevant.


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## M. LeRenard (Nov 30, 2012)

SkyeLansing said:
			
		

> It makes for horrible reading in early drafts, but I think it is actually helpful because it makes me know what the characters are doing and more importantly WHY.


I think you're right.  What I mean by being careful isn't taking care in word choice in the first draft.  It's more eventually making sure you take the time to sit down and really ask yourself what your story needs and what it doesn't, how to build it into a solid structure and reinforce the weak points.  So doing a word-vomit rough is not at all a bad idea.



			
				sunandshadow said:
			
		

> How do you get a clear idea, anyway?


Yeah, that one I still don't really know, but I do find at least that it's often necessary to just sit down for an hour or two and think about it.  I feel like sometimes writers tend to think that if they're not writing words every waking moment, they're not being productive, but that's a pretty silly notion.  Stories and poems and all that are sort of like really advanced logic puzzles, and you can't solve logic puzzles if you never stop to think about them.  But where that initial spark comes from, who knows.  I sure don't.  I seem to be getting them rather infrequently these days, probably because I often find myself thinking about other things.


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