Supersitions

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engmajor2005

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Any writing superstitions out there?

I never share WIPs. I wait until at least after the first edit. Almost all of the WIPs I have shared have remained WIPs for a loooong time. If I hold my cards close to my chest, then they get done in a reasonable amount of time (a month for shorts, and it's looking like the next novel will get done in the three months that is standard).

I will tell people that I'm writing something, and give them a simple blanket statement that basically narrows down the sub-genre (for example, with the new one, it's a "political fantasy thriller"). No plot, no characters, no scenes.

So, am I the only one with superstitions bordering on OCD?
 

Histry Nerd

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Three months is standard for a novel?

I really need to pick up my pace....

I'm pretty much the same with WIPs. Nobody but my wife sees them before the second draft is complete. I have shared the storyline of my current with a couple of people--but nobody but her sees the words on the page until I'm ready to give it to Betas.

Of course, I'm not published yet, either--so I have to limit myself to a couple of mild neuroses.

HN
 

Shadow_Ferret

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Three months? I've been on my revision phase for twice that now. Took 2 years to write!

But as far as superstitions, I don't know that I have any. I don't let people read my work, at all. And I don't talk about my work, at all. My family knows I write. They know I'm working on a novel, but that's all they know.
 

jamiehall

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I've found that it's not a mere superstition, it's a fact: if you talk about an idea when it is still in its early stages, it is easy to lose steam for actually working on it, or to feel like it looks silly in front of others and abandon it. If you tell it, the story has gotten out there, and there isn't so much pressure of it building up inside your head and screaming to be let out.

This concept of not letting your ideas out into the world too early is discussed in some detail in the famous classic "The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity" by Julia Cameron.
 

TsukiRyoko

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I made an oath to wear a threaded braid with embedded iwht beads in my hair until I was published a few years ago. Now it seems that whenever I go without it for more than a day, my muse goes away. Sow now I'm stuck with the damn thing.

Also, I never brag too much about what I'm writing. Whenever that happens, the story goes down sh!t creek.
 

CBeasy

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I don't generally let anyone know anything about what I'm writing until I'm done, or I feel I need their input with what I have so far. I just don't like doing it, though I'm not sure why. It's not insecurity, because I'm pretty confident in my writing, probably to a fault.
 

Sean D. Schaffer

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engmajor2005 said:
Any writing superstitions out there?

I never share WIPs. I wait until at least after the first edit. Almost all of the WIPs I have shared have remained WIPs for a loooong time. If I hold my cards close to my chest, then they get done in a reasonable amount of time (a month for shorts, and it's looking like the next novel will get done in the three months that is standard).

I will tell people that I'm writing something, and give them a simple blanket statement that basically narrows down the sub-genre (for example, with the new one, it's a "political fantasy thriller"). No plot, no characters, no scenes.

So, am I the only one with superstitions bordering on OCD?


Nope, you're not the only one. My superstitions are about the same as yours. I will not tell anyone what a piece is specifically about until I'm at least into my Second Draft....and I never release my First Draft for critique any more.

I don't really have any other superstitions that I can think of right off the top of my head, but if I do come up with some later on, I'll be sure to post them.
 

Bubastes

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I never talk about my WIPs (except with my writing group, and then only minimally) until after publication, and sometimes not even then. No joke. These days, I won't even admit that I write if I can help it. I tell people I'm practicing drums or knitting during all that time instead.
 
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engmajor2005

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Oh, and another one:

I keep my stuff on a jump drive and my laptop's hard drive. Even though I save the same to both directories, I always work on the file from my jump drive and then save to that first, then my hard drive. If I do this out of order, I go back and do it again in order.

(Okay, this is more of an OCD than a superstition.)
 

jamiehall

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engmajor2005 said:
Oh, and another one:

I keep my stuff on a jump drive and my laptop's hard drive. Even though I save the same to both directories, I always work on the file from my jump drive and then save to that first, then my hard drive. If I do this out of order, I go back and do it again in order.

(Okay, this is more of an OCD than a superstition.)

That's not OCD, that's intelligence. You have two copies, and you develop an iron-hard habit of making sure that one set of copies will always be the "official" ones (if you saved in random order, you might forget once, do a little tweaking, then re-open the wrong file and erase that tweaking).
 
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