I tend to write a draft, then interrogate it later.
"Does the protagonist have a long standing social problem?"
"Have they taken up an intimidating opportunity?"
"Have they exhausted all the stupid ways of doing this?"
"Are they really taking the hard way now?"
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The answers to those questions send me down another series of rewrites. More questions, more rewrites.
Rinse/repeat until the rewrites stop making it better.
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But I digress. It's a good thread. This part is especially true, fanfic is a complete joke.
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Fan fiction communities in relation to “published” fiction markets (text, screen) are a joke, compared to nonfiction social media vs old media. Non-fiction new media (blogs, newsletters) have pretty much brought all but the costliest investigative non-fiction to its knees.
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The importance of producing work is real though. Writing 10 novels is tough. Rewriting a single novel ten times is less so.
I did an exercise where I wrote close to a hundred flash fiction shorts and by the end I was much better at story telling.
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If I knew I was writing a Catch-22 it’d be worth a decade of effort. Writing 10 dreck novels would likely be less fulfilling for me than flipping burgers for 10 years. Some authors manage to be both good and prolific, but unlike nonfiction there’s no strong correlation.
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I've been at the novel I'm working on now for about five years. The first drafts bear little resemblance to the current one.
It might not be the Great American Novel yet, but I am confident that it is on a different level than the first draft.
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The key concept here is that it's not just practice that makes you a better writer, it's deliberate practice. That's why critique groups are so important. Write a million words with no feedback and you'll waste 900k of them.
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Fields that are NOT like that
More startups != better entrepreneur
More novels != better fiction writer
More acting credits != better actor
More movies != better director
More bills passed != better politician
More arrests != better detective
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I’m not sure this is true. That’s a relatively modern way of writing fiction in a peer group. Many great fiction writers appear to have worked largely alone. Deliberate practice need not be that social. It can be deliberate in isolation and in most fields it is that way.
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I agree. I think that writing groups are one way to achieve deliberate practice, but I have my problems with them as well. It's very difficult to interrogate your own fiction output, so a decent group can be the first step for that. Learning to use that feedback is its own skill
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I participated in one briefly. Absolutely hated it. I’d rather not attempt fiction at all than attempt it in that mode. By contrast, I like doing engineering stuff in group-review settings.
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It's a lot harder to get useful feedback because you have to take a sort of esoteric reading in order to make it useful. e.g. what does this mean in the context of my critic's capabilities and experience. Rarely do you have to second guess that much in an engineering sesh
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That’s mainly because it’s a lot harder to bullshit “critical feedback” in engineering since there’s a separate reality ground of actual testing. Less room for tedious projection and toxic games.
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Very true. Engineers can bikeshed, but at the end a thing works or it doesn't.
Deciphering feedback is only one way to take value though. I've found trying to fix other writers' drafts to be very illuminating. It's like walking in on a magician before they've perfected the trick
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