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urg writing
Apr. 4th, 2021 10:08 pmurg writing is hard.
Or rather, when I'm drawing, I know how to diagnose problems and fix it. (Things like "oh, the torso is too big relative to the head, let's make the head bigger" "the positioning is too boring, let's change the framing" "in order for this shot to work, I'll need to be able to draw legs and today is not a good leg day so let's switch it up") 80% of the problems I diagnose, I'm able to fix. The other 20% requires leveling up my art skill so... it's gonna take more time. (Although it's happening, slowly but surely -- when I look back at stuff I drew 5 years ago, I'm like "oh, I can actually draw this better now, so that's pretty heartening.)
But diagnosing problems and fixing it are skills that I'm still trying to build up re: writing.
I think my recent spate of finishing wips has helped on the problem diagnosing front. I've done things like:
- oh, when this Bucky makes this decision, it leads to plot that I don't feel equipped to write, so let's have Bucky make a different decision
- these scenes, while amusing, are actually irrelevant to the bulk of the story and drags out the beginning. Let me just condense this into a a 200 word montage and move into the story faster
- it's boring for Sam to have missed all of the fight and come home to an argument, so let's move the argument *to* the fight
Much of it involves moving story chunks around, deleting scenes that just don't work, and starting or stopping at a different place. These story level things are easier for me to diagnose, I think, because they're very adjacent to comicking. And it's so much easier to move things around in text than with panels! Every time I drag some words to a different place I'm just like "!!!! I can just .... do that????"
I think what's much harder for me to diagnose, much less fix, is when the scene needs more different words in order to convey a certain feeling or to adjust the pacing. (See, I don't even have to words to describe this). So much of this type of problem involves me going "urg, I need more words here" and then saying "I don't wanna". In comicking terms, it's like I don't want to draw the background to a splash panel, even if I know I gotta to make the scene work. The problem is that I know I can hunker down and get the background drawn, I *don't* know whether I can actually do the fancy words, and I'm not sure if it's even the right place to do the word stuff. (And then I read something that I wrote 5 years ago and I'm like "dang that's not bad", whereas whatever I *just* wrote feels objectively worse.)
Anyways, (a) urg, writing, and (b) guess I should keep working at it
Or rather, when I'm drawing, I know how to diagnose problems and fix it. (Things like "oh, the torso is too big relative to the head, let's make the head bigger" "the positioning is too boring, let's change the framing" "in order for this shot to work, I'll need to be able to draw legs and today is not a good leg day so let's switch it up") 80% of the problems I diagnose, I'm able to fix. The other 20% requires leveling up my art skill so... it's gonna take more time. (Although it's happening, slowly but surely -- when I look back at stuff I drew 5 years ago, I'm like "oh, I can actually draw this better now, so that's pretty heartening.)
But diagnosing problems and fixing it are skills that I'm still trying to build up re: writing.
I think my recent spate of finishing wips has helped on the problem diagnosing front. I've done things like:
- oh, when this Bucky makes this decision, it leads to plot that I don't feel equipped to write, so let's have Bucky make a different decision
- these scenes, while amusing, are actually irrelevant to the bulk of the story and drags out the beginning. Let me just condense this into a a 200 word montage and move into the story faster
- it's boring for Sam to have missed all of the fight and come home to an argument, so let's move the argument *to* the fight
Much of it involves moving story chunks around, deleting scenes that just don't work, and starting or stopping at a different place. These story level things are easier for me to diagnose, I think, because they're very adjacent to comicking. And it's so much easier to move things around in text than with panels! Every time I drag some words to a different place I'm just like "!!!! I can just .... do that????"
I think what's much harder for me to diagnose, much less fix, is when the scene needs more different words in order to convey a certain feeling or to adjust the pacing. (See, I don't even have to words to describe this). So much of this type of problem involves me going "urg, I need more words here" and then saying "I don't wanna". In comicking terms, it's like I don't want to draw the background to a splash panel, even if I know I gotta to make the scene work. The problem is that I know I can hunker down and get the background drawn, I *don't* know whether I can actually do the fancy words, and I'm not sure if it's even the right place to do the word stuff. (And then I read something that I wrote 5 years ago and I'm like "dang that's not bad", whereas whatever I *just* wrote feels objectively worse.)
Anyways, (a) urg, writing, and (b) guess I should keep working at it
