Comments on: When your writing lacks life

By: Laura K

Laura K — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 15:44:45 +0000

Ha ha, I did wonder! Though I think at 62 pounds you’d weigh about the same as a small child?!! I had an image of a bean pole!

By: ravibedi

ravibedi — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 13:01:48 +0000

Laura, sorry. It’s Kgs. I’d be at the bottomof the Arebian Sea with all those pounds!

By: Sabin

Sabin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 05:06:29 +0000

Mohana,

I think what you said it right. I just left my debut manuscript for about six months untouched–fed up with doubts and more self doubts. I picked it up yesterday, and began working on it with more life and love!

Thanks,

Sabin

By: Laura K

Laura K — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 23:07:39 +0000

Really??!!! Pounds??!!! Gosh.

By: ravibedi

ravibedi — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:54:47 +0000

Thanks a ton, Mohana. By the way, I weighed 62 Pounds in 1962, and still weigh about the same at five-feet-ten, so no need to lose weight. And yes, I need that power.

By: Brian A.

Brian A. — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:55:32 +0000

I’m not sure that I am that comfortable about someone blogging about how an unnamed friend’s work is not cutting the ice. Since you say you’re a publishing director, I do hope you are more professional at work than you have been on here. This is meant to be a site to support writers, not to allude to ‘friends’ of yours who don’t have the supposed insight that you do. Poor form.

By: Mohana

Mohana — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:24:04 +0000

It’s true that finding the middle ground is tough. Sometimes this can only come from experience with your own craft. For me the first rush through can be the freshest which slowly looses vibrancy as I let the editor creep in.

This weekend I helped a friend work on her plot and realized that while there is a time for talking through ideas, the messy work of letting a story run off the rails is what often captures the emotional center. And this is what keeps us hooked as readers.

Ravi’s right: sometimes we would be better off working on a golf swing or exercising to lose a few pounds and coming back. By rewriting everything? I sense a perfectionist… There are too many projects I want to do for me to have that kind of precision. But more power to you!

By: Ravi Bedi

Ravi Bedi — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 03:05:27 +0000

Mohana,

I get your point about constant editing; I suffer from the same phenomenon. I end up deleting interesting episodes and passages that do not directly relate to the plot. The solution, as you said very rightly, is to forget about the damn thing for a couple of months. More often than not, however, I start rewriting the whole thing and wonder if I should have devoted my time brushing up my golf swing, or painting instead.

Thank you for sharing.

By: kat

kat — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 23:51:59 +0000

I used to worry this was happening to my novels.

Then I started messing with a non-novel project that required me putting work up quickly, with little revision — and found out I’d been right to worry.

Don’t get me wrong — a lot of the unrevised stuff is clunky, clumsy, or just plain bad (and would be ten times work if I hadn’t spent the previous eight years beating my stuff to death with the Good Writing Stick.) But it’s got a lot of life, enough that I can read through a year later and find myself liking it… not something I can say for my longer works. It’s also a project I wasn’t taking seriously, in the sense that I don’t expect it to be published, so I took risks I wouldn’t have when novel-writing.

There’s a middle ground in there somewhere. Next project will have to be finding it.

By: barnesdavid

barnesdavid — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:53:25 +0000

I was recently on an excellent writing weekend led by Salley Vickers who spoke about releasing the child in us as part of finding our voice as individual writers.

I think one of the most challenging things to achieve is to find an authentic and compelling voice which is free to engage the reader.