“Summertime and the living is easy …”
We spent July on a micro-adventure, cycling to Wales (and back) from our home in France. I packed light but left room for a book (switched mid-trip for a fresh one), two tiny notebooks, and a BlackWing pencil for capturing ‘great’ thoughts.
As it turned out, there was way more pedalling than scribbling.
Our adventure turned into a longer-than-expected pause in the ‘Just Write, Right’ project, a gentle withdrawal from words.
Returning from the ‘pause’ offered an opportunity to shake things gently, to try something a little different.
I have been catching up with favourite
especially those with a knack for both fabulous writing and amplifying the voices of others.Take
and her brilliant ‘8 Questions for …’ series. This week offered an introduction to , a fascinating insight to a writer whose work I will explore more. This quote made me pause and scribble a note to self:In terms of the writing, I decided pretty early on that I would structure them as little essays, instead of breaking them up with a bunch of subheads and bullet points and bolded language like some folks on here do. I liked the idea of them being sort of craft essays, rather than a step-by-step guide. The sort of discursive thing you read through, get some enjoyment out of, and hopefully a nugget or two that might be useful to you.
Andrew Boryga
Regular readers will know I am not immune to “a bunch of subheads and bullet points and bolded language” but what if I tried a short piece on a particular notion? How would that work? I guess the only way to find out is to get into it.
Friend and fellow writer offered some gentle encouragement this week and it got me thinking.
Barrie, your fiction writing is developing quite nicely. Having read your work for almost a year now it is impressive to see. Really well done my friend!
So, here’s the question I am asking myself … how do writers judge if we are improving?
Thinking back, the intention behind ‘Just Write, Right’ was - still is - to provoke me to write more. By ‘more’, I suspect I mean ‘more often’ or and ‘more openly’. The idea is to use this space as “a deliberate provocation to the writer inside me to nudge him out into the open”. No hiding places and none of that “but I’m not really a writer” nonsense. Just write, right?
Measuring ‘more’ in that context is pretty straightforward. Did I write fiction that I was prepared to share before I created this space? No, not so much. Do I now share tales that have flowed from my pen … yes, no denying it, stories have appeared. People read them and even enjoy them. I still feel a bit awkward about the sharing - and there are plenty of pieces I ‘sneak out’ without e-mailing subscribers - but it is getting easier.
So ‘more’? There are measurably more words now than before.
But better? That’s the question.
How do we writers judge? Hold on a moment, are we even the people who should decide? We write the words, of course, but once we share they are taken out of our hands. Samuel Johnson has a thought about that:
A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.
Is having eyes on our writing a way to measure how good it is? First things first, it cannot be about the number of subscribers we have. The numbers just don’t matter. Having 400 subscribers is great and all that but if only 36% of them open a story (and a smaller percentage read to the end), that is only measuring who opened a particular e-mail on a particular day. The next story you send out, a different 36% might read it, or 18% of the original readership plus some new eyes. You could make yourself dizzy trying to measure all that and it truly says nothing about your writing.
Comments count. And they soon stack up. That’s a measure. Still subjective, granted, but a sense starts to build that stories are hitting the mark. It is not just individuals either. Not long after I got started on 1 May last year, I began to tune into a couple of micro-fiction communities. Prompts by
unlocked a series of 100-word stories, while sessions ‘by the campfire’ with offered a mere 50 words for your tale to unfold. These are engaged communities that show (through likes and comments) exactly how you are doing compared to others who have responded in a given week. Write a strong piece and positivity will flow, dash off something that’s not up to the mark, and be prepared for the tumbleweed. As you settle into these kinds of writing communities, you want to produce your best work. Nothing is more encouraging than comments from writers you respect.So, why micro-fiction, Barrie?
The long and the short of it is by challenging myself to ‘go small’, I can feel myself improving. I have a sense that the writing is sharper. So much of the padding has gone. It has to. There are few words to play with but the story has to be told. My first draft for a 100-word story will usually be 20% over … 20 words to lose but a storyline to hold onto. For a while, I would peck away at single words but recently I feel myself examining full sentences. In one case, I took the idea and rewrote the whole thing afresh. The result? A leaner, better story. Who says it is better? Me, for one. You just know and you cannot hide from yourself. I think we are back to the readers here … you can write for yourself (and I have talked before about how thinking about an audience of one can be a powerful tool) but you have to edit for the reader. Take out the extras. Remove the swirls and twiddly bits, the wordy flourishes. Cut to the chase and leave nothing behind that doesn’t add to the story. “Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you have omitted every word that he can spare” (Ralph Waldo Emerson). If the first draft is a black-and-white outline, editing is taking the crayons and colouring it in.
As Stephen King once wrote:
To write is human, to edit is divine.
None of this is particularly conclusive, is it? It is not in the least bit measurable. But I think that is okay. If the folk whose opinions you respect say that things are on the up, you are allowed to believe them. If that is based on ‘a feeling’ or ‘a sense’, that’s just fine too.
In the end, if we are honest with ourselves, writers know whether what we are doing is any good. Better? I suspect we know that too. Even if it is just a feeling, we sense how much the work we are putting in is pushing us forward; if we listen carefully, the stories will tell us if we have told them as well as they hoped.
I wrapped up last year with “23 Things I Learned About Writing”; there might be something in there that strikes a chord.
23 Things I Learned About Writing
The last time I wrote one of these newsletters, I added a list of ‘things I have learned along the way’. That was the most talked-about aspect of Edition 10. In a fit of ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’, I decided to share what I have learned over the past 8 months.
You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what's burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.
― Arthur Plotnik
But what did you write, Barrie?
An entirely subjective selection of ‘best bits’
Mopping Up
I have had an idea bubbling around for a while. A play on words, for that is what we writers do … play with words.
Salty Tales
I love this study of two young boys paying rapt attention to the salty tales of a shorebound sailor.
Until the next time, happy writing (and reading)
Barrie
What a great post and appreciate your honesty on the process of writing. I'm just in my very humble beginnings of writing but have learnt quickly this year that it is the edit that is everything. Having a weekly deadline to get something also focussed the mind, I need to write, to leave time to redraft/edit in order to publish. It's a really good discipline (and Stephen King is the best!!!)
I love that Stephen King quote. To my mind, the job isn't writing, it's rewriting - turning the great outpouring of something you needed to say into something others need to read. Good luck!