Learning by doing

Yesterday, I said that I was stopping to plot things more. Today I've realized I needed to retract that. I'll never become a good writer without writing. That means I need to do the work and put in the repetitions.

I listened to watched Claire Fraise interview Maxwell Andrew Drake (aka Drake) about finding the theme of your book. I was working on my story using this Claire's plot grid template and one of the columns was Theme. The problem was that I had no idea what she meant by the theme of my book. She had a link to this interview in the spreadsheet so I decided to watch the video. It turns out that the theme isn't complicated and I was already working towards it. My understanding was paper thin, so their discussion helped me flesh that out. Yay, I understand. I can check that off my list. ✅

It was the rest of the video and the part II video that gave me heartburn. Drake is a wildly detailed architect. His method for planning his novels is overwhelming. I kept wondering how I would ever be able to do something like this. He did say that there's no single correct way to write a book, but he was adamant about having a detailed plan. He even showed some of the documents he uses in his writing. The amount of planning he does was staggering. How can I ever learn all the stuff that goes into a successful story?

The answer goes back to something I said back in September about "writing ugly." I'm not going to understand all this as I write my first book. I'm going to have to write my first draft and let it feel thin. I can go back in the second draft and fix that. Then I can do a third draft, to fix more stuff. I need to let myself write ugly and just keep writing.

There's a caveat to that. I do need to study and learn the craft. I can't just write ugly and never try to improve. I need to study writing so I can find out the things I don't know. Then I can work on those things. In time I will get better and what is difficult today, will become much more natural to me.

Yesterday I said I needed to pause my writing. Today I realized that I need to keep writing, even when I'm not satisfied with the result.

P.S. I really need to find a better source of pictures for my posts. Too many of these are boring. Anyone have suggestions?