Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Writing and deadlines

A friend wrote:

Dammit, I always do this when I write. I start out with a good idea/concept/message, then I trail off into something else.

I replied with a thought that I'll expand here.

Going off on tangents is not necessarily a bad thing, since sometimes the tangent turns out to be the thing even more worth writing about than your original idea. There have been many times I thought I wanted to say something about Point One, and wrote four or five paragraphs that eventually petered out into pointless babble -- but by that point I realized that Point Two is even better and now that I've cleared my throat, so to speak, I can get on with it. And I wind up writing something that would be much better than if I stuck with Point One.

Other times -- especially if I'm on a deadline and I have to write about Point One -- after that first hour of inconclusive mess I can sometimes take a break, cross out most of what I've done so far, re-attack it by reminding myself of the value of the original idea, and then get it done.

That's really the way I wrote that essay in October, the one I read at the Litquake event*. After an hour I was ready to give up, but because of the deadline I got back in the box and tried again. So sometimes deadlines are a good thing.

* That essay was then accepted for Best Sex Writing 2006 -- you can already pre-order the anthology, which is due out in June from Cleis Press and which will feature me, Susie Bright, Stephen Elliott, and many others.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

but by that point I realized that Point Two is even better and now that I've cleared my throat, so to speak, I can get on with it.

And that's just what I did. Thanks for helping me through it.