Drafting Dos & Don’ts, or Missives of a Maniac

So, yesterday marked the beginning of ‘Tider Mark II Draft II’, truly a red-letter day in my life, and – I’m sure – in yours. Me being me, and my life being what it is, though, nothing went to plan; in this as in everything I make a mess of, however, I managed to learn some stuff. It’s my civic duty to pass it on, so that those wobbling in my footsteps might avoid the same pitfalls and experience no delays as they ascend the misty heights of Mount Brilliant.

Aaaw, *man*.
Image: tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com

So, without further ado, here is what I learned from yesterday’s editing. Reading it, one would be forgiven for thinking I had never edited anything before, ever. This is so far from the truth as to be laughable. It makes me wonder about the state of my brain, and its ability to retain what I put into it.

Anyway.

Things learned (so far) from Tider: Draft 2

1. Don’t mess with (what you think is) your only copy of your text

So. Picture the scene. I opened my computer file, and all was well. Birds were singing, sunlight laughing through the window, the world was a multi-hued picture of sheer unadulterated beauty, and so forth. I may even have giggled and sung soprano, à la Snow White, c. 1937.

This is the kind of look I’m aiming for, right here.
Image: animatedfilmreviews.blogspot.com

I’d been happily snipping and cutting and editing and making huge editorial decisions for goodness knows how long when a realisation hit me, and it was akin to having a giant, cold bucket of slop poured over my head. It put paid to the singing and the sunshine, let me tell you. That realisation was:

What did I think I was doing, messing around with my only copy of the text?

I’d been doing really well, I thought, saving as I went and being really careful to back my work up to my USB stick, as I always am. Every change I made, I’d saved it. I seem to have been so interested in making backups of my edits to realise how stupid it is to edit any document without making a backup of the whole thing first.

So.

First thing you don’t do when you’re editing a long and important document is this: don’t start hacking away at it without having a backup made of the entire thing. What happens if you decide later that your editorial decisions were wrong? What happens if you preferred it the way it was before you started editing? What happens if you delete something vital by mistake and you don’t realise it until it’s too late? None of these will become disasters unless you don’t have a full copy made of Draft 1 before you begin.

2. Don’t lose the password to your new phone with all your notes in it

Perhaps this one is very much a ‘me’ sort of problem, and has arisen because a) I’m technologically challenged, as you know, and b) I got a new phone recently, which requires a different password to be entered for every tiny little function. It is enough to drive one to the brink.

What my new phone does have, however, is a wonderful note-taking function; I’ve been making great use of it for the past week or so, ever since I learned how it works. I’ve been ruminating on plot twists and character motivation and possible endings and even writing a back-cover blurb (it’s great for focusing the mind on the important bits of your plot, FYI). The only drawback to this is that I tend to forget stuff once I’ve made a note of it. Once it’s in the phone, it doesn’t need to be in my head. This is all fine, if getting into the phone didn’t require the same levels of dexterity, quick thinking and chutzpah needed to outsmart an ancient booby-trap.

Okay. So, I swipe the screen, and enter the password… Hang on, hang on. The *what?*
Image: impassionedcinema.com

Of course, I eventually worked it out. Of course, it turned out to be the simplest thing in the known universe. And, of course, I felt like a total pillock when I realised this. But the short version of this story is: keep a good hold of your passwords. At the last count, I have twenty-three of them. Don’t lose ’em or mix ’em up, particularly when your nuggets of wisdom regarding the dramatic climax of your work of genius are stored safely away behind ’em. Capisce?

3. Don’t worry too much about formatting page layout, &c., as you go

Perhaps this is as clear as day to most people. To me, however, it is a challenge. I’m the sort of person who has to have everything perfect – it helps me to keep a handle on the document overall if I know all my paragraphs and page layouts are okay. I’m not sure why this is, because having perfect page breaks has zero effect on the document’s contents. In any case, I tend to stress myself out over things like making sure there are no ‘widows and orphans’ (in terms of sentences, naturally), and that all the proper indents are in place, and that every new speaker has their own line in blocks of dialogue, and all these other things that don’t really matter until the final edit. They’re very important – don’t get me wrong – but when you’re up to your neck in the middle of your second edit, don’t stress if a paragraph isn’t perfectly laid out. Seriously.

The final point, however, is probably the most important one. Are you ready?

4. Don’t start freaking out until you remember you emailed yourself a copy of the document two weeks ago

If I had remembered this first, I could’ve saved myself all the stress I went through during Point 1, above.

My peace of mind has been irrevocably damaged. I mean, I’ll never look at a USB stick the same way again…
Image: evangelicaloutpost.com

Yes. After I had spent goodness knows how long freaking out over all the work I’d lost from being so eager to begin my edits without making a backup, I realised I’d emailed myself a copy of ‘Tider’ a while back, which had the original version of everything I’d edited. So, then I started singing again and the sun came out, and everything was rosy once more.

Let this be a lesson. Not only do you need to be clever enough to make backups, but you need to be clever enough to remember you’ve made backups. Take it from one who has suffered, so you don’t have to.

Happy Tuesday! Together, we’ll make it through.

 

 

Diving Back In

Today, it’s the ninth of April.

Image: howmanyarethere.net
Edvard Munch, The Scream

You may remember me saying, some time ago, that I planned to get back into my novel(s) at the start of April, and get at least one of them ready to start doing the rounds of submissions before the end of the month. Well, you’d think I’d have started the process by now, then, wouldn’t you?

I haven’t, though. Partly, this is due to being quite busy so far during April, but mainly it’s due to something else entirely. Something to which I am no stranger.

My old nemesis: Fear.

I opened my computer file for ‘Eldritch’ the other day, and began to get that old familiar thrumming in the chest once more, the dead giveaway that all is not well within. I read through the first few pages and realised that there were 150 more to go, and my vision started to blur. I had to close the file and step away from the computer for a while – so far, ‘a while’ has been ‘a week, nearly’. My gaze fell upon my hard copy of ‘Tider’, complete with all its handwritten, sweated-over notations, yesterday, and I couldn’t bring myself to open up my box-file and just deal with it. I know I have to do this work, and I know (or, at least, I’m *fairly* sure) the stories contained in both these files are worth saving – at least, to me. But all of this logic and reason and sensible-ness tends to go out the window when you’re faced with the unenviable reality of writing: it’s hard work, and it may (and indeed probably will) be hard work which will come to nothing.

I know how it feels to put my heart, soul and kitchen sink into a project and watch it vanish without trace. I know how bad that felt at the time, and how it made me slide into a trough of depression that lasted the best part of a year. I don’t want to go through that again. I have no way of knowing for sure, of course, that the same thing will happen with my creative work, but the old fear is there, lurking, waiting to pounce.

But then, I have to realise that this fear isn’t what it seems. It’s definitely there, skulking about like a wolf in the woods, but it’s not necessarily a fear of failure in the eyes of other people. It’s not even a fear of success, as I’ve talked about before here on Blog Central. I have a feeling it’s more of a fear that I’ll fail myself, that I’ll let myself down, that I won’t do a proper job of this work, that I’ll do it ‘wrong’, that it won’t ever be good enough… Paradoxically, of course, the way this fear manifests itself is to paralyse me from taking positive action, and to stop me from opening up my files and getting stuck in. My fear of not doing the work properly is keeping me from doing the work properly. Analyse that!

Yeah, I don’t get it either.
Image: blogs.babble.com

I may not have said this before, but I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist. Like most people with this tendency, if something isn’t 100% correct and exact the first time it’s done, then it’s very difficult to deal with it.  Part of my brain wants to just shut away all my work, lock up all my files and never look at them again, and close the door on all the words that aren’t good enough, that don’t meet the (self-imposed) ‘required standard’. I also tend to be very impatient with myself, and if I can’t pick up a skill or learn something the first time I try it I often feel like a failure. I don’t necessarily give up trying, but somehow the enjoyment is taken out of it for me. So, once again, I find myself wondering why I’m drawn to the life of a writer, which is the sort of life in which tendencies like these are definitely not helpful. In fact, they are the very things you really need to overcome if you’re going to be able to live peacefully in a life which requires you to write, rewrite, draft, redraft, correct yourself, edit and undo lots of your own work, and learn that you can’t write a book perfectly the first time around.

Writing is rewriting. This I know. I don’t tend to write the sort of first drafts I’ve read about on writing websites, or on other writing blogs, which are basically ‘spews’ of emotion and feeling and characterisation and story without any structure or narrative; my first drafts are careful, tentative, over-written and over-complicated. So, necessarily, they aren’t good enough to be exposed to the world. But it’s almost like I’m trying, even from the first draft, to do my absolute best – to make the work ‘perfect’. But, of course, it never is perfect the first time around. This tends to hurt my head a bit. It’s amazing how you can know something with your rational mind, but your more irrational, emotional, instinctive side can be completely unaware of it. No matter how much I know the books I’m writing can’t be perfect the first time they’re written, I still try to do it. And by doing so, I set myself up for ‘failure’, which locks me into the fear, which means diving back into the work of fixing my words is ten times harder than it needs to be.

God, I am a complicated little person.

Perhaps this is why I want to be a writer. What better way is there to face up to these irrational tendencies and deal with my crippling perfectionism than by forcing myself to work through it? I managed to do it before – ‘Tider’ is in its sixth or seventh draft, let’s not forget, and it’s still not right – but because I’ve left it so long, picking it up again now and starting the work again is like starting from scratch.

It’s going to be difficult. Send me your good vibes. I will need them.

This isn’t just an excuse to use a picture of Westley. The point is, I’m attacking my problem. Just in case you were going to accuse me of being gratuitous.
Image: cinemagogue.com