Jackie Dana

Confession of a Perfectionist Writer

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I have a confession. I’m a perfectionist.

Isn’t that what writers aspire to become? The kind of writers who can spew perfectly-composed prose, elegant plots, and compelling characters right from their fingertips, as if every time they touch the keyboard another gem gets added to the page.

I’d like to be one of those writers. Hell, I’d like to meet one of those writers! Because the truth is, very few people can write beautiful stories the first time around. Even the greatest writers of all time have gone through drafts.

J.R.R. Tolkien (image from Wikipedia)
J.R.R. Tolkien (image from Wikipedia)

When I was a high school senior, I was lucky to go to Marquette University and see some of J.R.R. Tolkien’s manuscripts on display. I was astonished to learn that some of the characters we know and love didn’t start off with the same names we know them today (I seem to recall Gandalf was one of them). I was even more amazed to see lines scratched out and scribbles in the margin. Tolkien! Even a man that brilliant didn’t get it right the first time around.

As you work on refining your skill as a writer, you trick yourself into thinking you can get it right the first time, every time, and then get disappointed when things fall flat. That’s where a lot of people give up, in fact. If you keep at it, you realize that writing is all about drafts and editing.

Once you come to that point as a writer, and fully embrace the concept of ripping apart all of your drafts, tossing countless words and phrases to the proverbial cutting room floor, something happens.

Hint: It’s not that you become a great writer and start publishing everything. Oh, no, it’s never so simple.

What happens is that you become obsessed with editing, and refining, and getting it perfect. Didn’t I say we all aspire to become perfectionists?

And once you fall into that trap, it can become just as crippling as the feeling the new writer experiences when nothing sounds right. You can get so caught up in the process of writing-editing-writing-editing-editing-editing that you can’t really move forward.

That’s where I was stuck last fall. I couldn’t really start new chapters, much less new projects, because the old ones weren’t done. I still had editing to do. I needed to finish.

When I participated in NaNoWriMo last November, I had to break out of that trap. NaNoWriMo is about quantity, not quality.

Wait, what?

daliYes. The idea is that every day you write something new, and keep moving forward. You don’t edit, you don’t cut and paste. If you’re honest, you don’t even go back and re-read what you wrote for the entire month. Instead, you spend time every single day creating something new.

This is liberating, because you break out of the editing trap. You give yourself permission to experiment. You learn tricks to breaking out of writer’s block. And at the end, you have a massive piece of writing that could never have happened so quickly if you kept going back and editing, proofreading, cutting, changing.

I’ve managed to overcome the editing trap, but I’m still a perfectionist at heart. This means that it’s still difficult for me to share my fiction until it’s done, until it has been through the crucible of editing and been refined, purified, polished up to a sparkling gem. What I cannot do is put rough drafts out for all eyes to see.

One of my colleagues, Robyn, has just started a blog that stands in defiance of perfectionism. In Goodbye, Red Pen, she is doing what I can only dream about… writing and publishing a draft chapter every day. While I sit here belaboring the process of writing for my daily blog challenge, she’s actually putting herself out there, displaying her fiction as naked, unedited prose for the world to see.

I am so awestruck by her courage… and her gorgeous writing.

I’m also inspired by her example, and am considering posting a few snippets from this month’s writing as part of Camp NaNoWriMo here on my blog… but even then it won’t be everything, just the stuff that has passed through my harsh internal censors. Even the thought of doing it gives me hives, so we’ll see how it goes.

For now, check out her blog… it’s been a week and the story is fantastic. I can’t wait to see what happens next!

Writing and Music

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Image from AlexVan on Pixabay
Image from AlexVan on Pixabay

When I write fiction and really want to focus, like many people I like to listen to music. To this end, I’ve discovered that there are three different broad categories of music that work for me:

  1. All-purpose writing music
  2. Mood music
  3. Project-specific music

For the first category, I like classical and early music (medieval/renaissance/baroque). This generally is music that either has no lyrics or the words are in another language so it’s not “sing along” music. Most of the time I get distracted by music with lyrics that I know and am more tempted to actively engage with the songs than actually get writing done. Some of my favorites here include Debussy, the flute music of Seamus Egan, the Baltimore Consort, and the music of Philip Glass, which also is something I frequently turn to when I am trying to visualize a scene.

When I say “mood music” it’s music that helps me set a general tone for the work. If I’m writing about characters in a dance club, I might listen to music that evokes that kind of setting. For scenes that are supposed to be disturbing—for example, in my current work, that might be nightmares that I’m describing—I like classical music in lower ranges or that are a bit atonal.

In this category I’m also discovering soundtracks to be useful. The music from Doctor Who, the TV show Merlin, and the Hobbit all are on this list because of the memories/images they evoke in me and how those emotional responses translate into writing. And recently, I’ve added the soundtrack to The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is excellent.

From Wikipedia
From Wikipedia

My favorite is the third category. As I write, there are songs that evoke a certain feeling, or that are referenced in some way by my characters, and over time the songs take on meaning. For my current project, I include in this list Fiona Apple’s version of Pure Imagination, which I think would be a great song to open the movie version of this novel, should I be so lucky. (I disregard the fact that the accompanying video was made as a commercial). I also include in this list the original Singing in the Rain since one of my characters sings it, and Benny Goodman’s Sing Sing Sing, which I envision is playing by the band in a dream sequence.

Thanks to Spotify, I am always exploring new “soundtracks” that aid in the writing process. I’d love to hear what music others find particularly helpful, and why.

Unexpected inspiration

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You have to grab good ideas when they find you, or they’ll pass you by and someone else will get them.

Someone, I think a musician, said something along these lines, and the idea stuck with me. You never know when you’ll be struck with inspiration, and you need to be able to capture it or it will fly away.

For several months, since December or January, I’ve been struggling with a major plot point in the novel I began for NaNoWriMo. As I edited the novel, the hole became more and more glaring, and no matter how I tried to fix it, nothing felt right. Night after night I tried to come up with a solution, writing lots of bits I later cut, and redoing the previous chapters to try to make something work. All these attempts, however, were failures. Nothing clicked.

It got so discouraging that I had a hard time staying motivated to finish the project, and caught myself dragging my feet when it was supposed to be writing time.

This week, I gave myself permission to set that struggle aside for a month. With Camp NaNoWriMo beginning on Tuesday, I decided to write backstory about my characters, inventing scenes with them that happen before the main story of the novel itself. It’s been an interesting and somewhat fruitful exercise in general, but over the past few days, I haven’t produced anything particularly noteworthy.

Source: Wikipedia
Source: Wikipedia
Today was opening day for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and I was lucky enough to get to see it this afternoon. As I was watching the pre-show, my mind wandered, in that idle meandering way of a writer. Because I had written about him last night, my thoughts turned to my protagonist, about whom I had learned some intriguing tidbits. Thinking I might want to keep writing about him tonight, I asked myself, would he like going to see movies? How would he feel if he found himself sitting next to a perfect stranger, as I was doing?

All of a sudden, my synapses started firing. And then… there it was. The epiphany I had sought for all these months, the golden lightbulb moment. I suddenly knew exactly how to fill in this missing section and get my character from point A to point B, all while tying together other important plot elements.

The amazing thing about it was, none of this happened during the movie itself. It all took place in a matter of seconds as the previews ended, during the brief warnings to turn off your cell phone and not talk during the movie.

So it just goes to show… you never know where or when inspiration will happen, and never really productive to try to force it.

Postscript: Captain America:TWS was a fun movie. Lots of action and good looking men and women, but remarkably, there was actually a decent, logical (well, mostly) plot, which is becoming a rarity for action movies in the 21st century.

Beer and Writing

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10169162_10203552677754527_1806189607_nFounders Kentucky Bourbon Stout brewed with chocolate and coffee and aged in oak bourbon barrels.

As soon as I heard about this beer, a limited seasonal beer produced by Founders Brewing in Grand Rapids, MI, I knew I wanted to try it. Doing my due diligence, I learned it was supposed to be released on April 1 here in Austin, and I was prepared to go to my local “beer store” to grab some before they sold out. I’m friends with this particular store, Sunrise Minimart, on Facebook, and that’s how I learn about all of the cool new craft beers that they get.

Except they got the beer a few days early and although they posted an announcement on Facebook, Facebook decided I didn’t need to see that particular post, so by the time I realized what had happened, it was all gone.

It was a fail on the scale of Greek tragedies.

And then, a fellow homebrewer posted a photo on Facebook yesterday with, you guessed it, a four-pack of KBS. I commented on his good fortune, and he let me in on a great secret…

He had purchased extra!

Tonight, instead of writing as I had intended, I spent the evening drinking some amazing craft beers, including the KBS, which was just as amazing as you might expect from a beer with chocolate and coffee and aged in bourbon barrels. Words really can’t do it justice. The coffee is subtle but the chocolate is so rich, and the taste of whiskey is just the perfect compliment to the other flavors.

Oh right, words. I mentioned that I was supposed to be writing.

Well it’s late, and I’ve been relaxing and drinking beer. Most people in my sitiation would say, meh, I’ll skip it for tonight and pick it up again tomorrow. But not me. I signed up for Camp NaNo with the intention of writing every single day, and then agreed to a blogging challenge with a similar goal. It’s only April 3rd… I don’t want to be branded as a slacker on the third day!

So here, with less than an hour to go, I’m squeezing in my daily blog post.

As soon as I hit publish on this post, I’ve got some fiction to write before the clock strikes midnight, so I can log a word count for April 3rd. The good thing is that I’ve already decided that I want to continue to explore the history of one of my protagonists, and have several scenes already floating in my head. I’ve also decided that at some point he’s going to find an excuse to drink a nice craft beer. 🙂