So I wrote 30,000 words and I'm not sure I learned anything at all. Any advice on being self-reflective? I can't ever seem to see my own words straight.
If you mean editing this story: set it aside for a while and come back. Fresher eyes can give a lot of distance, which is a lot harder when you've been living with the story in your brain and hauling out each sentence not long ago.
Alternately, maybe you're someone who does best with another set of eyes. I'm pretty good at tweaking my own stories on the sentence level, but in terms of anything big and structural, I'm shaky at best. So I shove it at Becca or Emmy or a fandom-specific beta (or a beta who doesn't know canon at all) or something, and if they come back to me with "you know, your ending isn't really an ending" or "you should probably put in another conversation or something to make it clearer how they got from point A to point C," then I can sit back and say "huh, you know, you're totally right." Or "No, it doesn't need a conversation, it needs a plot point there," or whatever.
If you mean more in general terms of what being self-aware about what you learned from the process, then again, my best guess is time. I'm never aware of what I learned in a given writing experiment, other than "I can write [thing] at least to some degree!" It's only later, if ever, that I can look back and say "wow, that taught me a lot about doing [subtler thing]."
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2014-07-02 05:40 pm (UTC)Alternately, maybe you're someone who does best with another set of eyes. I'm pretty good at tweaking my own stories on the sentence level, but in terms of anything big and structural, I'm shaky at best. So I shove it at Becca or Emmy or a fandom-specific beta (or a beta who doesn't know canon at all) or something, and if they come back to me with "you know, your ending isn't really an ending" or "you should probably put in another conversation or something to make it clearer how they got from point A to point C," then I can sit back and say "huh, you know, you're totally right." Or "No, it doesn't need a conversation, it needs a plot point there," or whatever.
If you mean more in general terms of what being self-aware about what you learned from the process, then again, my best guess is time. I'm never aware of what I learned in a given writing experiment, other than "I can write [thing] at least to some degree!" It's only later, if ever, that I can look back and say "wow, that taught me a lot about doing [subtler thing]."