Writing

[lady_karelia]

To all who write, I'm curious. Why do you write? I'm genuinely curious, and I don't want anyone to draw ideas from others' comments, so I'm screening comments for a day or two. I just want a really honest opinion. And if you don't want your comment to be seen, say so, and I won't unscreen it. I'm just really curious.

Comments

[persevero.livejournal.com]

Most people seem to say they've had a compulsion to write fiction since they first put pencil to exercise book, and that was initially true of me (my mother keeps a stapled-together wad of paper entitled 'Detecshun Mistri Horro' dated just after my fifth birthday and containing a ghost story) but school soon squashed it. There was a one-off flare when I sat the 'Use of English' exam that used to be a requirement for scientists doing Oxbridge entrance, when I squirrelled the composition title 'What My Life Will Be Like In Old Age' into a pastiche of Rose Macauley's The Towers of Trebizond - I was so overcome with my own humour that I laughed out loud in the exam room - but I wrote no fiction after that for three decades. Even when I read my first few SSHGs I thought that I would forever be a consumer rather than a creator, or a beta at best. But then a hardback notebook started filling up during the kids' swimming lessons, against my better judgment and almost against my natural inclinations. It is only recently that I've realised that I have always told myself stories in my head any time that my hands are occupied but my brain is not (sewing, driving) or when I can't sleep. The actual writing is surprisingly hard for me; well, it surprises me because I am a ready and fluent writer of non-fiction: I actually enjoy writing essays. I am not naturally suited to the process of writing fiction (dialogue is especially hard) but I have a compulsion to work an idea out and express it somehow. Very, very slowly...

[lady-karelia.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing. I used to write as a child; as a teenager, I contributed to the high school magazine writing fairy tales, lol.

Writing slowly is not a bad thing I'd say. I used to find it fascinating how some writers can produce 4k in one evening whereas I feel highly accomplished if I write more than 500 words in a day. Then, of course, adminning taught me that often, the fast writers are the ones who take short-cuts with editing, and with many, it comes down to sloppiness. Writing slowly effectively means you think a lot about what you write, which generally shows in more complexity of the plot/characterisation and cleaner work, so I find that definitely positive. There is, maybe, one fast writer out of a hundred who can actually produce decent work. The majority cannot, and if they do, it shows. Of course, sloppiness with editing is my pet peeve, LOL.