Writing: 1,298 words
I made a rather enlightening discovery this evening.
When I sit down to write each evening, I generally start out by rereading the section that I most recently wrote, just to get my creative-mind back into the flow of the scene. And I almost always wind up rewriting a line or a couple of words here and there throughout the section, which is why my wordcount is a fluid sort of thing with a ten or fifteen word margin of error at any given time. But I've been trying to minimize the amount of rewriting that I do, because I'm also learning that rewriting is the quicksand that can drown a piece of fiction.
I have long treated all writing as an act of translation in which the correlation between thought and language is imprecise at best. The purpose of rewriting is to close that connotational gap by finding the words that lie closest to the central meaning being conveyed. Once I have expressed my thoughts to my own satisfaction - when the words I'm using are about as near to my meanings as language can ever be to thought - then the objective of rewriting has been fulfilled.
But I've never really been content with that. Telling my story the way I want to tell it has never seemed a worthy pursuit to me. It seems almost as if I had convinced myself that literature had to do something more than tell a good story well. That it had to be weighted with strata of symbolism and metaphor, that it had to be poetic and lyrical, that it had to be spiritual and preternatural and metaphysical, that it had to be in all ways literary.
And this evening I realized it seems that way: because I had convinced myself of that. I had not been rewriting in pursuit of clarity, but in pursuit of some ambiguous measure of quality. I had been treating my own writing as inadequate, and editing it not to bring it closer to my ultimate meaning, but to push it toward a subjective standard of what makes writing good. I had ultimately been lying to my reader and myself, because if fiction is the truth that we tell inside the lie, then bad fiction is a lie with no truth at all.
So I was rather enlightened to discover this evening this it's not up to me to decide whether my writing is any good or not. So long as my grammar and spelling are accurate and my stories are coherent and told to my own satisfaction, it is ultimately up to any particular reader to decide for herself or himself whether they subjectively enjoy any particular piece of my writing. Even if I do decide that a particular piece of writing is "good," there will always be reader who will disagree with my clearly-biased assessment, and who am I to tell them they're wrong?
No measure of literary merit will ever be objective, so no piece of fiction can be said to be objectively good in a meaningful way. I can only write the stories I want to write in the way I want to write them, and let the reader decide. So tonight I wrote 1,291 words, and I wrote them the way I wanted to, and I brought my total manuscript up to 88,881 words. And then I wrote seven more words just for kicks and ended up with a manuscript of 88,888 words.
And as I wrote those words, I was pleased to realize that I will not rewrite them. Because there is a truth at the center of those words worth more than all of the metaphysical contrivances I could ever impose upon them. They tell my story how I want them to tell it. And that is a worthy pursuit.
When I sit down to write each evening, I generally start out by rereading the section that I most recently wrote, just to get my creative-mind back into the flow of the scene. And I almost always wind up rewriting a line or a couple of words here and there throughout the section, which is why my wordcount is a fluid sort of thing with a ten or fifteen word margin of error at any given time. But I've been trying to minimize the amount of rewriting that I do, because I'm also learning that rewriting is the quicksand that can drown a piece of fiction.
I have long treated all writing as an act of translation in which the correlation between thought and language is imprecise at best. The purpose of rewriting is to close that connotational gap by finding the words that lie closest to the central meaning being conveyed. Once I have expressed my thoughts to my own satisfaction - when the words I'm using are about as near to my meanings as language can ever be to thought - then the objective of rewriting has been fulfilled.
But I've never really been content with that. Telling my story the way I want to tell it has never seemed a worthy pursuit to me. It seems almost as if I had convinced myself that literature had to do something more than tell a good story well. That it had to be weighted with strata of symbolism and metaphor, that it had to be poetic and lyrical, that it had to be spiritual and preternatural and metaphysical, that it had to be in all ways literary.
And this evening I realized it seems that way: because I had convinced myself of that. I had not been rewriting in pursuit of clarity, but in pursuit of some ambiguous measure of quality. I had been treating my own writing as inadequate, and editing it not to bring it closer to my ultimate meaning, but to push it toward a subjective standard of what makes writing good. I had ultimately been lying to my reader and myself, because if fiction is the truth that we tell inside the lie, then bad fiction is a lie with no truth at all.
So I was rather enlightened to discover this evening this it's not up to me to decide whether my writing is any good or not. So long as my grammar and spelling are accurate and my stories are coherent and told to my own satisfaction, it is ultimately up to any particular reader to decide for herself or himself whether they subjectively enjoy any particular piece of my writing. Even if I do decide that a particular piece of writing is "good," there will always be reader who will disagree with my clearly-biased assessment, and who am I to tell them they're wrong?
No measure of literary merit will ever be objective, so no piece of fiction can be said to be objectively good in a meaningful way. I can only write the stories I want to write in the way I want to write them, and let the reader decide. So tonight I wrote 1,291 words, and I wrote them the way I wanted to, and I brought my total manuscript up to 88,881 words. And then I wrote seven more words just for kicks and ended up with a manuscript of 88,888 words.
And as I wrote those words, I was pleased to realize that I will not rewrite them. Because there is a truth at the center of those words worth more than all of the metaphysical contrivances I could ever impose upon them. They tell my story how I want them to tell it. And that is a worthy pursuit.