Daimys – Response for Chapter 4

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#405

I’ve never had a problem scrapping a piece of writing and starting over. In my first semester of undergrad I had a professor who always said “make sure every sentence stays relevant” so if there was something we wrote that was interesting but not relevant to what we were writing about at that moment, we were to save it in a different document called ‘Pieces’. It got me to compartmentalize projects and staying focused – not losing myself in too many interests. I had another professor, later on, who always said the most liberating part of writing is the ability to start over. So I was ‘junking’ my work, even things I really loved but I knew weren’t helping the writing forward.

But that was all for ‘academic’ writing. When I started writing stories, I found that all I did was scrap; there wasn’t anything I found worth saving. Chapter 4 was a huge help because it is grounded in tips for writers. It offers points of entry into the revision process. I especially liked the section on riffs. As someone who sings, music analogies help me understand concepts in a deeper way. The riff section helped me realized that what I thought was ‘irrelevant’ can actually help move a story along, even if it isn’t readily connected to the story I’m trying to tell. Riffing in music takes skill, but it also requires risk. Riffs can go terribly wrong, even for the most experienced singers, and that is something that really speaks to me in terms of writing. Even the most experienced writers can have riffs that don’t work, and that need to be removed. So trying a riff, although risky, doesn’t seem as daunting as before.

[Sondra Perl]

#413

Daimys, I’m really interested in your point about riffs, how they can help us reclaim the “irrelevant” aspects of our writing, and use them in ways that keep our drafts dynamic and exciting. Your previous professors’ concerns about what is “relevant” and “irrelevant” is something I haven’t really thought about before. When I’m writing, I find it very difficult to discern relevance. It all just comes out, and it’s only through the revision process that I’m able to get a handle on what is going on. Personally, I carry around a lot of baggage from my early education–I often feel a pressure to construct tight, organized sentences while composing my first drafts. However, over time, I’ve learned that that just doesn’t work for me–that’s not the kind of writer I am. Instead, I have to let things be messy in the initial stages, taking inspiration as my cue. And then, when re-reading and revising, I comb through my work and remove the “irrelevant” parts. For me, this has always been a very intuitive, feeling-based experience. Not so much zeroing in on relevance, I try to rearrange and adjust my work so that it “feels” right. And consequently, writing takes on an emotional/spiritual dimension. You mention in your post that you are very comfortable tossing everything out as you draft and revise. I could probably take a page out of your book. I have always struggled with cutting, wanting to keep everything in the draft, overwriting. One of my first writing teachers called it “killing your darlings.” It really cleans the writing up, but sometimes it’s just too hard to do…

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