Things I hate

"join the club?"
My personal pet peeve is going through my writing to find grammatical mistakes - and i make a lot of them

Actually, chewing paint chips isn't too bad. Try a nice soothing color in a satin finish.

Seriously though, I don't particularly care for the whole writing process. What I mean is, my brain works much faster than I can put the words down on paper. I really have the whole story lined out my head, but it takes forever to write it out. Actually, rewriting for me is going back and fleshing out the skeleton.

Hobbes said:

Actually, chewing paint chips isn't too bad. Try a nice soothing color in a satin finish.

Seriously though, I don't particularly care for the whole writing process. What I mean is, my brain works much faster than I can put the words down on paper. I really have the whole story lined out my head, but it takes forever to write it out. Actually, rewriting for me is going back and fleshing out the skeleton.

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It is nice to know that someone else shares this same problem. I do this too. I can think of a 1000 different scenerios/scenes to write about but my fingers can't seem to keep the same pace as my mind...

Letsplaydressup said:

Does anyone else find that doing a re-write is a kin to chewing paint chips? Or am I the only one. If not, what do you hate about the process of writing or just wish you didn't have to do?

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Yeah, it's pretty freaking tedious, that's for sure. I hate rewrites and I hate doing research (whether for a non-fiction piece, or a fiction piece requiring accurate historical info, for example). Writing first drafts are my favorite thing. Oh, and getting a "we are happy to let you know that we have accepted ...", that's always a good part.

Oh man, I am the total opposite! I hate writing first drafts because they are so ugly and say nothing of what I want to say. But when re-writing and editing, I get to make everything beautiful and shiny and happy! Yay!




-Michelle

drachin8 said:

Oh man, I am the total opposite! I hate writing first drafts because they are so ugly and say nothing of what I want to say. But when re-writing and editing, I get to make everything beautiful and shiny and happy! Yay!

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This is me, too. My first drafts are little more than necessary evils. Rewriting is where the good stuff happens!

I like revising, but I hate finding all the things I repeated...over and over and over.....

How could I not see that when I wrote it the first time?

I hate the initial writing process because I'm such a clock watcher, or in this case, word watcher. I type and type and type, end up at some point in the story, and I'm always thinking, "Criminey! I still have blank number of words to go! I'll never complete this." It's like climbing a mountain. Am I there yet? Am I there yet? Come on! I've been climbing for days!

But rewriting. That means I made it to the top. Now I just need to polish it. The hard part is over.

drachin8 + Shadow Ferret = how I feel.

I like hoarding initial ideas, aka plot bunnies, until they get big and fat. Then I like trussing them into outlines and doing research. Then I like racing through a first draft. Then I like slogging through all the subsequent drafts, reworking and rewriting and polishing. I don't even much mind marketing.

What I HATE, HATE, HATE is getting rejections.

I don't have anything I particularly hate about the writing process, but I have one major pet-peeve as far as reading is concerned. I cannot stand writers who obviously place no importance on the language that they use in the telling of their story. Amateurish writing is for amateurs, not anyone trying to proclaim themselves a professional writer.

This is why I try to get it right the first time and save any rewrites for years later, when I've come to consider the story lousy and know that I can do it better now. If I were to rewrite immediately (or even shortly) after finishing a work, then yes, I'd detest it just as much. But I wait so long between rewrites that it seems like an entirely new project by the time I get around to it, and I no longer consider the original work to be as good as it was before.

I imagine this process works a whole lot better if you don't have publishing deadlines and such (I'm not seeking publication), however.

One of the things I hate most about the writing process is my difficulty keeping track of things since I write such long series stories. It's such a pain to take notes, and an even greater pain to refer to them. I wish my memory was good enough that I could keep all these various things in order without having to keep looking back at what I already wrote!

And I'm sure there's more but I'll spare anyone reading this.

I enjoy editing / rewrites, because they make me feel that I'm tightening up the story and making it better. Though I'm with tehuti: some time and mental distance before attempting the rewrite makes it much easier.

There are two things I dislike:

* Petering out on a story midway because I've lost interest...much more a problem in my past. I recently went through some of my old notebooks and found story after potential-filled story incomplete, because I'd flitted on to something else.

* Getting to the end of a story without having another one already in mind to write. Often I do overlap nowdays, especially since I try to discipline myself to finish the one I'm on before starting the next, but every once in a while there will be a gap of despair during which I'm sure I've drained my creative well forevermore. Pure misery.

--Q

I don't rewrite for the same reason that I don't outline: because I get bored to death with the story I've already written and want to escape it. Rewriting makes me whiny, and I usually end up repeating myself anyhow. I like to edit as I go.

That being said, I will go back through the story and tweak things once I'm done.

Editing is addictive