salvage operations

[truepenny]

matociquala's been thinking about the learning curve for writers, and I guess I am, too.

Both of the worlds I'm cannibalizing for this new story are things I was working on industriously when I was a college student. (I say "worlds" instead of "stories," because there's only one actual completed story in the bunch, and it's hooked to a bunch of other things that never got off the ground.) These are things I was serious about, working on hard, things that I believed mattered. And things, incidentally, that I was very pleased with myself about.

So in digging out the bits I want (character names, an elaborate history of the haunted house which is going to be my setting, incidental details, etc.), I've been obliged to read through what I'd written, leaving me with my hair standing on end like the quills upon the fretful porpentine.

The finished novella isn't so terribly bad, partly because it went through a couple major revisions in the intervening years, and thus the worst idiocies of plot and dialogue have already been dealt with. It suffers mostly from being about the wrong thing.

But the unfinished stuff, including almost a hundred pages of narrative and notes for a completely unfinishable fantasy novel, is skin-crawlingly embarrassing. I have made the following observations:

1. I cannot write romantic comedy and should not be allowed to try.

2. It is good that I have made heroic attempts to overcome my natural tendency to write dialogue as if I were doing the play-by-play.

3. Nothing will make you look stupider faster than trying to write about things you don't understand.

4. Characters do not become more endearing when they behave like escapees from a soap opera.

5. Twenty-five is not nearly as old as I thought it was when I was nineteen.

Mostly though, it's just tedious. I'm bored by my own writing. And that's really more mortifying than even the worst excesses of naïveté revealed by the plot and characterization.

If nothing else, I'm demonstrating to myself today that I have improved as a writer in the past ten years. I can see what's wrong with stuff I thought was absolutely brilliant at the time. And while it's rather embarrassing, it's also comforting. Because at least I've moved on to a new set of mistakes.