sung said:
I'm in a similar situation.
After writing for the entire holidays, I made the 8000 word limit only to have it torn to shreds by my ee2 teacher when we came back. I now have to start again and although i know exactly what it is that i want to do i just cant seem to get it out on paper.
I didn't have as big a word count but went through a very similar feeling when I had to write something for my ENGL218 (aka creative writing) class at uni.
The problem with me is in the way I "see" my story. For some reason I tend to see my inspiration in a kind of internal movie format (even though film/script stuff is TOTALLY not my forte), combined with a fleeting emotional feeling. Translating that into words is major :S, regardless of what your creative inspiration process is. You really just have to give it your best shot... if you sit there thinking you're never going to get it, you really won't (as you will have nothing on paper! haha!)
I think many of us will our our stuff ripped into pieces at least once. I had my first working draft TOTALLY torn by my first external critic
I had a serious think about what she'd wrote and realised that she had some valid points, AND some invalid points (but due to fact I hadn't made myself clear enough). I went through my work and circled the bits I liked and the bits I thought had potential... I then REWORKED (read: "rework", not "burn it and start all over from scratch") my story. It went in a completely new direction with a totally new feel, but it ended up working much better than my original idea.
Sometimes things just aren't going to work for you personally, OR they are not going to work as well as other things might. This is just a fact of life, it's nothing to beat yourself up over. Just try something else - try a twist. Isolate the problems and fix them - it is rarely the entire work at fault.
sung said:
I always just write something then quickly delete it, thinking that its not good enough. Starting again has made me really demotivated and i feel like i have to drop but i really dont want to.
I'm drowning "gurgle gurgle"
Going back to my own creative process here, but since my "inspiration" is so fleeting I rarely get to write long extended pieces. Rather, I find myself writing short ones in succession that may have NOTHING to do with each other, and/or be in no chronological order. DON'T THROW THESE AWAY! It is good stuff, you have just not found it's "place" yet.
What I do is I keep all these "workshopped" pieces at the end of my word under a dotted line or similar. This way it's always easy to flick down and look at them - don't freak out if you think they're bad, or think they don't make sense. Several of my "workshopped" pieces only ended up in my first and
final drafts - because they really only "fit" in then (we're talking a time frame of about 6 months here!!!). But I'm glad I kept them, because they ended up being perfect!
I'm not sure if you go through the same thing, but my point is to hang onto all your stuff
I've never heard of someone being able to write a perfect story, or part of a story, in one draft. It's almost as if for every good piece you write, there's an additional 5 pieces of crap you had to go through in order to get to the good stuff - but you needed to go through those 5 pieces of crap FIRST in order to develop the good stuff!
We make things better by refining. But we need SOMETHING to refine - that's the stuff you think is bad
Keep it there. Make notes on what you like about it, or how you'd like it to improve. Then improve it. If you still don't like it, repeat the process until you are satisfied.
*throws giant plastic duckies for people to hang onto*
