wasted words?

A day later than I planned for today's posts, but life is the way it is. the following started as notes from a conference and obviously morphed, hopefully for the better as i thought it all through.

I dont’ know if its typical or not, but I’ve tried to put how I write into words that might be useful and interesting to others developing their writing skills, I realized in the process that I write much more than will ever make it to print, vastly more. I don’t just mean journals and practical things like how to’s and character sketches, blogs, class nots and conference notes, story notes and alien word lists. I mean even in the writing of stories I want to get published, hope to get published. I write perhaps many times more than ever makes it to even a good solid "first" draft in many cases (Cerelian Gold is still an exception and I have had to add much without deleting much to get it to its current stage). I usually write entire scenes (large portions of novels) that will never make it to print, and that’s only counting each unique scene once, rather than the several times I might have written and rewritten it (I have stacks and stacks of boxes of paper notes besides computer notes. Some of the latter disappear into the ether but i periodically save versions and if I remove more than a few words at a time, I often cut and paste into a “not used” file. I originally did it because I hated the thought I might prefer it to the new version, I might decide it was a necessary scene after all, I might... and just hated to really delete ANYTHING. Since then I’ve learned that it has other values, because the reason something didn’t work for one character might be exactly why some speach pattern, some atttitude or expression or reaction would be perfect for another character in another story, or at least the seed for a piece of a scene, even if it is wholey changed by the time it is morphed into that new novel. They are, in essence, my ideas, even if they don’t get used as originally intended, and ideas are worth capturing.

I have also written "just for fun", that is, what some might label fanfic though I never intend that it should be read by anyone else, trash fan fic, stories with some minimal basis in old tv shows or other people’s stories just to try out one of my characters in differnet scenarios and settings, to introduce them to characters I grew up with and feel like i know enough to guess how they might react to a character such as mine and build ideas for how to display my character at their best, worst, how not to display them. and of course, just for fun because I like to play and have not lost my imagination though youth is long behind me. I’m horrible at getting the tv characters “right”, but that’s okay. It’s like a first draft that never needs a second draft because the act of trying to put it into words builds images in my mind that I can then play with for hours with and without pen in hand, (like on long drives) whereas if I just daydream without writing, the image is more fleeting, less substantial, and quickly lost. (In medieval times, there were many unique and interesting ideas about where the thinking mind, the emotional heart, and the soul might reside in the human body. I'm convince that my mind, at least, is in my hand, I think best with pen in hand.)

I know that some people can hold onto day dreams better, and some of them say, even believe that they have “composed a story” that they just haven’t written down yet... They can envision it very clearly, or what seems to them in a lot of detail, and for some that might be true, that they have a very good tv show image of the story. That’s a long way from writing even a script, though, and I suspect many would find that their great novel has the substance of a one hour tv show, if they tried to put it into words. The mental image is usually very much that--images--even if they have a mental view of the dialog to accompany the pictures. I will compose as I drive, work to hold onto some scene or part of scene in all its phrases, and when I get it to paper at drive’s end, I have maybe a paragraph of real substance and some vague notes that go beyond or around it, rarely better than any other first draft, and often worse, though it might have captured a good idea or two to work with.

The act of transfering mental words and images to real words on paper or computer screen is a different act that thinking about it in more ways than I suspect even writers like myself fully comprehend. It is, in many senses, like translating - in thinking, you hae one speaker, in putting the image into initial words, the not-even-quite first draft, you have the translator listening, and then in the polishing and revising you develop the real translation into the new language. Or I might liken it to the act of picking up a paint brush. Still the art is not on the canvas when the first words are written; that's only a bit of color on the brush until all the thought and revisions shape the art in the layers of paint, shape, shade, and color. And ultimately, like the artist or the musician, I fell like all those words that never make it to print, whether play or purpose, concentrated revision or wild ideas that go nowhere, every word is the practice necessary to make the new piece, the next story work.