Hot Wells is a San Antonio hotel that was built in the last 19th century and counted as its guests people such as Charlie Chaplin and Teddy Roosevelt.
Since that time the hotel experienced at least five different fires and now all that is left is the bath house, the hotel itself long gone. And even the bath house is now mostly a ruin, with walls that defy gravity and bricks piled everywhere. But despite its rundown appearance, it’s a magical place.
“If you could zoom through space in the speed of light, what place would you go to right now?”
That’s the question for today’s Writing 101 Challenge, A Room with a View.
This is an easy one to answer: if I could be anywhere right this minute, it would be on an empty beach in Hawaii.
I start by wandering around for a while, letting the ocean water tickle my feet as it rushes forward in a soapy crush, and then recedes just as quickly, the perpetual tease of the tides. I’d allow my feet to sink into the water-logged sand as I walked, the softness cushioning my toes. Every so often the waves would play a joke, and while I was lulled into the complacency of ankle-deep cool water rushing over my feet, a stronger wave would push the water to my knees, catching the hem of my skirt, before dashing back into the sea.
WordCamp Austin was a massive success today. 400 people attended, and we had packed sessions, great conversations, fun and games, and learning galore. People got help with their websites, attendees learned about WordPress security, theming, and coding,
This month I’ve been participating in my colleague’s blogging challenge, and so far I’ve managed to post every day in the month of April, which means after tonight, that’s eight consecutive days of blog posts. All of the posts so far have dealt with writing, more specifically something related to Camp NaNoWriMo.
What I’ve found curious is examining which of my posts have been the most popular, measured by traffic or by comments.
The two winners so far are last night’s post, The Confession of a Perfectionist Writer, which I think has more comments than any blog post I’ve ever written, and perhaps my post Writing Partners, in which I did little other than post a photo of two of my cats.
My takeaways from this are that I either need to post about the inherent difficulties of writing, or just post more photos of my pets.
It also makes me wonder what makes for a successful blog post? Are there topics that resonate more than others? Or to be successful, should we all just post cute animal photos? 🙂
Beyond that, how should we measure a successful post? Should we consider overall traffic (stats numbers)? Engagement? Sharing? Something else?
If you have a blog, what have you found works the best for you?
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.
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?
Yes. 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!
