About two years ago, I took up writing as a hobby - a concerted effort to do something with purpose that I had long done haphazardly, randomly, a pleasure where it had fit, in several different corners of life - a bad habit of unreliable blogging, a worse habit of adding flourishes to essay-writing in college. It worked for what I needed, offering me an outlet and an excuse to give myself more deliberate quiet time to myself, something I would probably never bother doing for its own sake.
And so, writing's inner circle flourished, my mind segregated for a few hours a week into a place where I could indulge my creative impulses to follow ideas with a persistence that my wayward and flitting imagination had never managed, not least because my rote memory has always been so poor, my wayward musings mostly carrying off into nothingness on long walks when I was lucky, or while driving to work when I was not lucky.
The first thing I wrote was a long and cliched semi-veiled autobiography of my 20's that allowed me to explore connections and themes in a persistent manner that I, myself, had lived through. In a formless third-person narrative, at first derivative of styles and techniques of myriad writers I admired, I sketched the subset of my own prior mental states that have stood the test of time - the feelings that I now feel to have been most true, most lasting during that time. In the space of a hundred-and-fifty pages, I wrote and re-wrote, a thousand pages or more, perhaps. (Pages's flashback feature intrigues me - perhaps some day I will go read random passages long lost to re-edit, to find the things I should never have discarded.) However, for my concerns with my own writing, editing is not the most acute. I rather trust my sense of detecting terrible, lifeless writing, and if acting as my own editor has done anything, it has given me adequate chance to hone this one skill.
On learning to write well, there is a hierarchy that I perceive as going something like this:
1) Always tell the truth
2) Write sentences well
3) Write paragraphs well
4) Write stories well
"Well" is conveniently vague, but requires economy, and consistency, and avoidance of contradiction, and a respect for theme second only to the respect for truth.
And of course, someone can get caught up on any one or more of these things, but it would not be surprising to find out that there are plenty of writers who can write a perfectly serviceable sentence, but for whom this skill does not proceed to the ability to write entire paragraphs or stories. One problem I have encountered on these levels is the problem of pacing, and I must admit that I do not think this problem is the final problem normally encountered moving up the hierarchy, nor is it an easy problem to solve in and of itself. But I am starting to get a sense that pacing is an issue of avoiding doing certain things wrong. In other words, it is not necessarily the case that the pacing problem is one of pursuing "immaculate" pace. You just don't want to be jarring in a way that detracts from the story. Sometimes I wonder if all of sentence breaks, and paragraph breaks, and the choice to narrate or tell in dialog, is primarily a choice of pacing, but I could never do without any of those things, for my pacing is largely uncontrolled and needs all the help it can get.
And how does a person write a story well? I haven't even begun to grasp. But themes are required, and real people, and real things must happen on some level, that someone, somewhere, must be capable of caring about. From an inner circle perspective, it is here that I fall back on the fact that I care about these things, at least while a story appears to hold some theme or themes that I believe are more than the sum of the words on the page. And the fact that sometimes a story does until it doesn't - the themes just fall right out the bottom of the thing when you change it the wrong way - is both fascinating and terribly disheartening. What I have found is that by paying attention to these things, I force myself to maintain economy in a story - which I act as if is superior to the tenet of making sure something happens, a quality that I myself have already suggested has to occur - so now I have contradicted myself, haven't I? I suppose this is most appropriate, and should not be surprising, though, given that the majority of my stories also come to life and ground to a frozen half-finished state by such a similar order of events - a conviction that something has to happen, which gives life to an early form, a cleansing of form and content in order to establish one or more feelings which I believe the story requires in order to amount to something more than words, and a paralysis in this state when I find myself unable to add anything further without destroying my carefully-constructed diorama of melty feelings.
How does a person know the outer world of writing - the impression that other readers will be given and the reaction they will have to a story? I have found alarmingly little talk of this among writers. Mostly, I think they learn to accept what is unknowable, and learn to have a thick skin, and live with it for the paychecks, or for whatever else the outside world gives them that must inextricably bring along the outer world of criticism and varied feedback.
But what do I really know about this world as a whole? Is it common for others never to release their work for their concern with these unknowns? Is it common to wonder if unforeseen feedback - whether it feel ostentatiously good, bad, or indifferent - will color, damage, even destroy the authorial mechanisms by which stories are protected from undesired influence?
What does it mean for someone whose opinion you value to get something else from your writing than you intended, and make that thing known to you? Can feedback from the outer circle be constructive? Is making it constructive a separate set of skills from the inner circle feedback mechanism? Which is more likely to be useful, and which is more likely to produce neurosis, or paralysis in the writing mechanism?
Perhaps it is my nature to do everything possible to preserve the rare things that work, and so I am simply required to be fearful.
