Here I was cruising along on getting my 100 days of posting done and then life happened….. So I missed yesterday because of life. However, here’s why I’m not going to penalize myself and start my clock over: LIFE FUCKING HAPPENS.
Anyway, in less profanity laden language, things happen and if I penalize myself every time I don’t get things perfect, I will never get anything done. You’ve all heard that you have to give yourself grace as you move toward your goals right? Yeah, so anyway, giving myself grace for yesterday and moving right along. What am I writing about today: process. In specific, my current process.
I know quite a few different ways these days to work out how to get something done, but I think I’m going to, going forward, work on a multi-draft approach. For those of you who have been around me a while, you probably know how much I despise editing. Like flames on the sides of my face (get the reference) hate editing. However, I have learned even the things that you don’t like are sometimes absolutely necessary. I am still an adherent of Dean Wesley Smith (don’t know him, look him up) and I don’t think I’ll be doing too much changing to the inherent story once it’s down, but there is something to be said for tightening up the language.
I’m wordy.
And, to this day, can never remember where the comma is supposed to go in certain situations. So yeah, I’m going to write the story, then I’m going to edit it for language and sundry, then I’m going to turn it over to someone else to tell me if it’s absolutely utter schlock or not. I’m not a good judge of my own work in that regard. That reader is probably also going to be the one who helps me figure out how to tighten the language further and tells me if I put the commas in the right places.
How does this differ from the way I used to do things before? Well, let’s be completely honest, my work has been good, but it can be better and choosing to NOT EDIT hasn’t been working for me in terms of overall quality. Therefore, it is time to change things up. As many say, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. I won’t say I’m not insane, I fit a couple of the clinical definitions, but I will say that I can and have learned a little more about this whole writing thing over the years. If you’re keeping score, my first published work came out in 2014. So I’ve been writing ten years, I’ve gone through a couple of different processes over time, and this just happens to be where I’ve landed at the moment.
Anyway, what’s your process? How do you go through getting words on the page for others to read?