Writing VS putting words together

Hi folks!

It's early (ok - it's almost 9 AM). I decided not to go out today because I feel truly bad (depression). Instead I'll be focusing on writing - including a new post for you!

As you can tell from the title today's post will be about the writing process.

Let me first define 'writing'. In general this is 'putting down words so that they form sentences that make sense'. Most people can do it, some better than others.

The writing I want to discuss however has a lot more to do with your state of mind. The writing considered in this post is TRUE WRITING. This means it's writing that not only makes sense as a single sentence but actually forms a text - and specifically the text you wanted to write. This kind of writing happens when the story is 'going well'. It makes sense in the context of what you intended to write.

There is another thing that I call 'putting words together'. This is also writing - but not in the sense discussed above. It might be coherent and even cohesive BUT it is useless writing in the context of your book. Sure, you're putting words together, and the words have the names of your main characters in them, but honestly, none of it makes sense for your story. You're rambling. You're going off on a tangent. Know that feeling? I think we all do.

So what is the problem with putting words together?

It's simple. The words are not useful to your project. These are the words that will likely be cut. They do not make sense within your story. They're just words in sentences. The sentences make sense. Their input into the story does not.

This 'putting words together' happens to me a lot when I force myself to write. At some point in some stories (usually when my initial goal is too low - more about goal setting in another post) I lose sight of what I wanted to say. But because I'm a writer, and because I often don't realize it immediately, or because my initial goal (OH THIS IS A STORY ABOUT SOMEONE WANTING TO BE FREE) changes into something else (THIS STORY SHOULD REALLY NOT ONLY BE ABOUT THIS CHARACTER TO BE GREAT!) I push on.

Usually this 'putting words together' turns into a mess. A mess I later (even after the 'first draft' so to speak is finished) never want to lay eyes on again and therefore don't. This is how my computer (not my drawer - who keeps their mss in a drawer nowadays?) and probably yours too acquires a lot of stories that do not work out. That's okay. Don't worry too much about those. Think bigger instead. Worry about the next story instead.

Think about what went wrong with the words you put together. There are two reasons why putting together words doesn't work.

a) you lose sight of what you wanted to do
or
b) what you wanted to do isn't big enough and you WANT TO GO BIG

a) This is a simple one. You are tired. You lost sight of what you wanted to do. You don't actually want to be writing this any more (probably because you lost sight of your goal for the story or your story has outgrown it) but you feel guilty about abandoning it. Well, abandon it anyway. The new story (and you know there's one in your head that is MUCH BETTER than your initial idea) will be superior and work out more smoothly. The time you're putting into trying to fix that broken plate would be much more productively spent just buying a new plate. It'll also be much shorter.

b) The story you're writing has outgrown what you set out to do (A post on too-low goal setting coming up shortly as well! Stay tuned!). This happens to me a lot. I will start with a simple idea (because depression balks at GREAT IDEAS) and about 40k words in realize that THIS STORY SHOULD BE DIFFERENT. It's not doing what I wanted the simple story to do. It's much bigger. It needs to be much bigger. And this isn't about fairy-dust dreams. This is about experience.

Sure, at some point during the writing (usually around the 30k mark actually) everyone wants to DO SOMETHING ELSE. SOMETHING BIGGER. SOMETHING BETTER, FASTER, STRONGER.

But that's not what I'm getting at here. I'm getting at real experience, when you KNOW how you work and what won't work for you. I'm there after spending almost 15 years writing nearly every day. I can tell when I'm just being lazy vs when a story isn't working out. That nagging voice in the back of your head that says 'go write something else' 'this story needs MORE'? It might be right. It might be that you're advanced enough to KNOW THYSELF. It might not be laziness or fear of taking the risk of failure after all! Have you considered that?

A good conclusion to this post might be to say: HOLY HECK IT GOT MUCH LONGER THAN I ANTICIPATED. But truly the point of this post is: If you are just putting together words like some 5-9 clerk wanting to get it done and over with there might be something wrong with your story (check a and b above). There is nothing worse than being lost and without meaning in the world (and this includes the world of story writing). If that's the case you need to go deeper into your story and you need to figure out what you actually wanted to say. I promise you the writing blues will disappear like spiders when you've finally found a tissue to remove them (show them the door!) with.

Do you have any experience putting together words instead of truly writing with a purpose? Let me know in the comments! I'm not just saying things when I say I'd really love to know!

WriteBot out.