The White Lily (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
thewhitelily) wrote2008-01-22 11:42 pm
thewhitelily) wrote2008-01-22 11:42 pm
Entry tags:
On Perfect Expression
Some people find the blank page intimidating. A whole empty white page, staring at you, with nothing on it but possibility.
Not me.
I have a short attention span, but as long as I prevent myself from alt-tabbing away from a blank page for long enough, it ends up with writing on it. Lots of writing.
My problem is the imperfectly filled page.
I managed to elucidate this to a friend today, so I’ll do it again here: my problem is not that I’m shy, it’s not that I’m haughty, it’s not that I don’t care, it’s not even that I don’t have time. My problem is that, if what I’m feeling in my heart and barely grasping the edges of in my mind doesn’t transfer perfectly across onto paper, it’s not close enough to what I meant to say. It’s not good enough for me to allow any other person to see, because they’re not looking into my heart, they’re not looking into my conceptions, they’re not even looking into my casual daydreams. They’re looking into a lie.
I don’t like lying. It makes me uncomfortable, even to tell a white lie, and so I’ve developed the habit of picking an incidental truth I can inflate rather than lie about the whole. Whenever I end up telling a lie, I slip into quick-time, where everything seems to take twice as long, and my inner monologue starts screaming at me: I am telling a lie at the moment. This is not the truth. This rendition of my opinion is factually incorrect. I don’t so much feel bad about it as feel incredibly aware of it and fundamentally uncomfortable. I can sometimes even enjoy it, but it’s a bungy-jumping exhilaration of wow-I-could-tell-this-person-anything-and-they’d-have-no-reason-to-disbelieve-me-but-why-am-I-doing-this-again?
In other words, I’m perfect lie detector material, with my stress levels going through the roof as soon as an untruth passes my lips. I don’t think that’s particularly unusual.
The place I suspect I depart from normality is that expressing myself poorly – putting together a series of words that inaccurately portrays the sense of meaning in my head – gives me that same sense of impending doom as a lie, without any sort of redeeming features of doing so to avoid unpleasantness.
It isn’t that I’m worried about what people will think of me, that they’ll get the wrong impression, or that they’ll be hurt by what I say (although I do worry about that too). I’m me, and if people don’t like me, then why would I want them to like some person that I’m pretending to be, anyway? It’s not even, really, that they might get the wrong impression of me or that their mental image of me won’t match up with the original. I know that it never can, and why would I care anyway if it did?
My problem is that the pleasure in communicating with the world outside myself is only satisfying if I am communicating truth, only worth it if it communicates an accurate portrayal of what lies inside my heart or head or the outermost reaches of my imagination. If it’s not truth, if it’s not a faithful rendition of the universe in my head, if it’s not exactly right, then it’s intensely uncomfortable to say anything at all.
This is equally true for fact, fiction, or the most basic of personal interaction. This is why I work on the internet, in a way that I’ve only ever experienced with two or three particular people face to face.
And this, I think, is why I drove myself nearly to a nervous breakdown over Return to Sender, even though I’d only showed the draft to a few people I trusted. Not because I thought they would think I was stupid, or because I thought they would think that it was the best I could do. I knew they knew that neither was true and, despite my reservations, the feedback I received was overwhelmingly positive. But that draft of Return to Sender wasn’t truth. It wasn't what I'd meant. It wasn’t an accurate portrayal of the landscape in my mind, and every time I re-realised this I was plunged anew into the discomfort of having released it.
It wasn't actually that bad. To someone without that shimmering cloud of inspiration and lightning connections coalescing in their head, the dissonance between what was and what could have been would not have clashed so violently, so I have no doubt that no one who has read the story can understand why it upsets me so greatly. The problem was not that the story was outstandingly worse than any random story on the shelves of the bookstore.
The problem was that I hadn’t communicated what I felt, what I dreamed, what I knew was there behind the scenes. It was like trying to pass off a guestimated shorthand recipe designed to jog my own memory as the full banquet of lobster bisque and quail au vin.
It just plain wasn’t true.
Edited To Add: I've referred to this personality trait of mine as a "problem" all the way through here. That's not really the way I think about it. To clarify, it's not something that needs fixing, it certainly has its advantages in the quality of my writing, if not the quantity, and it's not even something that particularly bothers me once I understand why I'm behaving the way I am. I introspect because it helps me to understand myself and manipulate my future approaches to things to optimise the positive sides of the reactions I know I'm likely to have. And I post because when I manage to identify and express my theories about something well, it makes me want to share them. :)
---
This year I have a great deal on, writing wise. First of all, there’s the personal commitment I’ve made to submitting a manuscript to the Australian Vogel Award this year. (Deadlines = Love) I haven’t yet decided whether it will be Return to Sender or Cloud Castles. Given the above, I’m going to have to work pretty hard on at least one of them to bring it to a standard where I’m willing to let it out of my sight in just over four months time.
At the moment, I’m procrastinating. I’m supposed to be writing a play for my nieces’ school’s Mystery Festival: a humourous whodunit that concludes with each one of six suspects looking equally guilty. I’ve got almost two pages of it written, out of about ten – after which it will need editing. It’s simple enough now that I’ve got a multi-layered plot with a cast of seedy characters. It’s easy, it’s fun, I’ve got stacks of fantastic ideas, and it’s good procrastination for getting stuck into my more serious manuscripts.
Still, I’m having trouble focussing. I should be gazing at the empty third page of the Mystery Festival play, staring it down long enough that, to prevent me from dying of bordom, the creative juices will start to flow and sweep me up into that literary orgasm of productivity that will result in another few pages of script.
Instead, I’ve opened up a second word document, where I’m writing endless pointless introspections on my psyche and personality traits. Such as procrastination.
Speaking of which, my apologies for randomly disappearing for a six weeks once again. I’ve been rather overwhelmed by life: since we last spoke I’ve attended to Hubby’s grandma’s funeral, hosted the Lily Family Christmas Spectacular starring nine children under ten and a chocolate fountain, maintained an incredibly high level of productivity at work, broken down at Hubby under the strain and threatened to move to Sweden for a year, mopped up the remains of a two-foot deep flash flood in the office, and generally continued running at top efficiency in procrastinating writing.
Hmmm. Time to get back to it, I guess.
Not me.
I have a short attention span, but as long as I prevent myself from alt-tabbing away from a blank page for long enough, it ends up with writing on it. Lots of writing.
My problem is the imperfectly filled page.
I managed to elucidate this to a friend today, so I’ll do it again here: my problem is not that I’m shy, it’s not that I’m haughty, it’s not that I don’t care, it’s not even that I don’t have time. My problem is that, if what I’m feeling in my heart and barely grasping the edges of in my mind doesn’t transfer perfectly across onto paper, it’s not close enough to what I meant to say. It’s not good enough for me to allow any other person to see, because they’re not looking into my heart, they’re not looking into my conceptions, they’re not even looking into my casual daydreams. They’re looking into a lie.
I don’t like lying. It makes me uncomfortable, even to tell a white lie, and so I’ve developed the habit of picking an incidental truth I can inflate rather than lie about the whole. Whenever I end up telling a lie, I slip into quick-time, where everything seems to take twice as long, and my inner monologue starts screaming at me: I am telling a lie at the moment. This is not the truth. This rendition of my opinion is factually incorrect. I don’t so much feel bad about it as feel incredibly aware of it and fundamentally uncomfortable. I can sometimes even enjoy it, but it’s a bungy-jumping exhilaration of wow-I-could-tell-this-person-anything-and-they’d-have-no-reason-to-disbelieve-me-but-why-am-I-doing-this-again?
In other words, I’m perfect lie detector material, with my stress levels going through the roof as soon as an untruth passes my lips. I don’t think that’s particularly unusual.
The place I suspect I depart from normality is that expressing myself poorly – putting together a series of words that inaccurately portrays the sense of meaning in my head – gives me that same sense of impending doom as a lie, without any sort of redeeming features of doing so to avoid unpleasantness.
It isn’t that I’m worried about what people will think of me, that they’ll get the wrong impression, or that they’ll be hurt by what I say (although I do worry about that too). I’m me, and if people don’t like me, then why would I want them to like some person that I’m pretending to be, anyway? It’s not even, really, that they might get the wrong impression of me or that their mental image of me won’t match up with the original. I know that it never can, and why would I care anyway if it did?
My problem is that the pleasure in communicating with the world outside myself is only satisfying if I am communicating truth, only worth it if it communicates an accurate portrayal of what lies inside my heart or head or the outermost reaches of my imagination. If it’s not truth, if it’s not a faithful rendition of the universe in my head, if it’s not exactly right, then it’s intensely uncomfortable to say anything at all.
This is equally true for fact, fiction, or the most basic of personal interaction. This is why I work on the internet, in a way that I’ve only ever experienced with two or three particular people face to face.
And this, I think, is why I drove myself nearly to a nervous breakdown over Return to Sender, even though I’d only showed the draft to a few people I trusted. Not because I thought they would think I was stupid, or because I thought they would think that it was the best I could do. I knew they knew that neither was true and, despite my reservations, the feedback I received was overwhelmingly positive. But that draft of Return to Sender wasn’t truth. It wasn't what I'd meant. It wasn’t an accurate portrayal of the landscape in my mind, and every time I re-realised this I was plunged anew into the discomfort of having released it.
It wasn't actually that bad. To someone without that shimmering cloud of inspiration and lightning connections coalescing in their head, the dissonance between what was and what could have been would not have clashed so violently, so I have no doubt that no one who has read the story can understand why it upsets me so greatly. The problem was not that the story was outstandingly worse than any random story on the shelves of the bookstore.
The problem was that I hadn’t communicated what I felt, what I dreamed, what I knew was there behind the scenes. It was like trying to pass off a guestimated shorthand recipe designed to jog my own memory as the full banquet of lobster bisque and quail au vin.
It just plain wasn’t true.
Edited To Add: I've referred to this personality trait of mine as a "problem" all the way through here. That's not really the way I think about it. To clarify, it's not something that needs fixing, it certainly has its advantages in the quality of my writing, if not the quantity, and it's not even something that particularly bothers me once I understand why I'm behaving the way I am. I introspect because it helps me to understand myself and manipulate my future approaches to things to optimise the positive sides of the reactions I know I'm likely to have. And I post because when I manage to identify and express my theories about something well, it makes me want to share them. :)
---
This year I have a great deal on, writing wise. First of all, there’s the personal commitment I’ve made to submitting a manuscript to the Australian Vogel Award this year. (Deadlines = Love) I haven’t yet decided whether it will be Return to Sender or Cloud Castles. Given the above, I’m going to have to work pretty hard on at least one of them to bring it to a standard where I’m willing to let it out of my sight in just over four months time.
At the moment, I’m procrastinating. I’m supposed to be writing a play for my nieces’ school’s Mystery Festival: a humourous whodunit that concludes with each one of six suspects looking equally guilty. I’ve got almost two pages of it written, out of about ten – after which it will need editing. It’s simple enough now that I’ve got a multi-layered plot with a cast of seedy characters. It’s easy, it’s fun, I’ve got stacks of fantastic ideas, and it’s good procrastination for getting stuck into my more serious manuscripts.
Still, I’m having trouble focussing. I should be gazing at the empty third page of the Mystery Festival play, staring it down long enough that, to prevent me from dying of bordom, the creative juices will start to flow and sweep me up into that literary orgasm of productivity that will result in another few pages of script.
Instead, I’ve opened up a second word document, where I’m writing endless pointless introspections on my psyche and personality traits. Such as procrastination.
Speaking of which, my apologies for randomly disappearing for a six weeks once again. I’ve been rather overwhelmed by life: since we last spoke I’ve attended to Hubby’s grandma’s funeral, hosted the Lily Family Christmas Spectacular starring nine children under ten and a chocolate fountain, maintained an incredibly high level of productivity at work, broken down at Hubby under the strain and threatened to move to Sweden for a year, mopped up the remains of a two-foot deep flash flood in the office, and generally continued running at top efficiency in procrastinating writing.
Hmmm. Time to get back to it, I guess.
no subject
I can generally accept a lie on the page, if I can trace back from *that* to what was in my head. As long as there's the potential for truth, it doesn't bother me (though it's much, much more satisfying if there is).
LOVE.
no subject
obsessioninterest to me, but substantially irrelevant to this particular neurosis. I wouldn't, for example, ever be tempted to clarify after the fact: "No, you can't think that! That character's gay!" :P*nods* I can understand that - potential for truth with a tracable path back to the archetype in your head. Glad it works for you!
LOVELOVELOVE.
[/threeness]no subject
no subject
I used to be a sufferer, then I started considering that very first mark on the page to be "thinking on paper" rather than anything that would end up anything to do with the final product. *shrug* Works for me. :)
no subject
no subject
no subject
Curiosity, how do you feel about stuff like Axiom, or HSF, or MOI? Did you end up feeling those ideas translated truly? Since... well, they were brilliant to the rest of us. So... were you ever satisfied with them at all?
Whatever you did on those, do it again for the novels and they'll shine up any shelf I'm sure - even if they don't quite measure up to your personal standards. ^.^
[/shallow]
no subject
Axiom, HSF, MOI, and pretty much everything else I've actually released have reached the stage where the ideas are translated truly. I'm not saying I think they're perfect - nothing ever is - but the places where they're not perfect are either typo sort of stuff, or they're bits that weren't actually covered by the inspiration in my head. For example, I feel unhappy with my exposition in HSF, but there wasn't a big-picture-perfect-exposition in my head which I was betraying by writing it that way. I realised later that I would have done better by the entire thing by perfecting my portrayal of that, but... it lay in the connective tissue between the flashes of inspiration, which meant that I wasn't forced to perfect that before it could all click into place as being a worthy representation. Similarly, there's a couple of transitions in MOI and one in Axiom which still bother me with their roughness, but they're just the transitions between the actual passages of inspiration I channeled onto the page and am satisfied with. So, while I know the whole piece suffers a little for that imperfection, it's not something I feel compelled to fix in the same way I would with something that I felt inspired by but didn't manage to capture.
The more I learn about writing and what I like and what I don't like, the more comprehensive the vision in my head gets. In some ways that's a good thing, because it means the story out the other end has less of that rough connective tissue that I have to struggle through writing without my muse. In other ways it's a bad thing, because the more complete and shiny the vision gets, the more I feel overwhelmed by the task of finding the words for all of that radiant wonderfulness. :)
[/longwindedness]
*grin* Thanks for the compliments, you've made me feel all lovely and squishy inside. I look forward to having my novels shining on your shelves some day. :D
no subject
I don't know why I decided to comment you. Well, actually I do. I really appreciated all the comments that you posted about my story, and I was wondering if you had completed up to where I had last posted on LJ? Because I was looking for some more feedback you see.. I love you!
Can't wait for Nigel Kennedy tomorrow night either! Should be good! And if you end up sending in Cloud Castles or Return to Sender, does that mean I get to read one of them finally? *crosses fingers*
Stephie
no subject
Hope to have some feedback for you in the next couple of days. Hope to have CC or RtS for you in the next couple of months. Here's hoping both of those happen!
New IP so that should keep you guessing for about 20 seconds
(Anonymous) 2008-02-06 10:31 am (UTC)(link)As for your written work, maybe a different mental model would be helpful. You like to see perfection on a page. A different model would be to view it from the angle of the numerical technique of successive approximations. That is, each draft becomes successively closer to the unattainable perfect text [although that is only true within a certain bound of probability -- an actual draft may move away from perfection but it is only one part of an improving sequence]. You then need to define an epsilon strictly greater than zero so that when your sequence of drafts is within epsilon of perfection you stop [since perfection would probably take an infinite sequence of drafts].
What do you reckon?
TPWFL
Yet another IP
(Anonymous) 2008-02-07 02:11 am (UTC)(link)TPWFL
Re: New IP so that should keep you guessing for about 20 seconds
For example, at the moment, I'm trying to find a strong verb to use to describe a raindrop striking a puddle of water and creating a small circle. The closest word I can think of is "coin" - "the rain coined the pools of water". But that doesn't work in the slightest for flow,using words that actually exist, or even feeling right. So, we try all the "strike" synonyms: pelt and hit are too strong. Fall, patter, strike, meh. Then there's all the water sounds: splash, splatter, spatter, splosh, slush, ripple, puddle... But none of those words are really any better than any others - I could put in any number of them as placeholders which all would do, none of them are the one, so I'm stuck. An hour later, I have the answer: pocking. Thus: "pocking the street with ripples the size of shining pennies".
Of course, from that point on, it's lovelylovely mechanics, and I can iterate to my hearts content over grammar or flow or what colour the lights reflected in the water are. But before I had "pocking", no successive approximation would have brought me closer to the answer. It's that quantum leap of inspiration, from having all words equally wrong to having the one word that is perfect. In this case, it's a single word - but sometimes it's a character's personality, the subject of a whole scene, or a decision on plot direction. I can't see clearly, I don't know how or why it's wrong or how to make it better, but I still know it is wrong because I can feel that dissonance.
Darn arts. *grumble*
However, you're totally right - perhaps leaving "coining" there as my approximation until next time I looked it over would have loosened the overstrung brain connections and allowed me to see the answer. It's very possible. It would certainly have allowed me to move on and knock any other low-hanging fruit before going back to obsess over the ones that are definitely difficult to capture in words, thus decreasing the overall panic-factor of the proceedings.
Hmmm. Yes, definite possibilities here.
Thanks for commenting! Always good to hear your perspective on things - you never know what's going to hit the nail on the head and help me think about something from a different angle. :)
Re: New IP so that should keep you guessing for about 20 seconds
(Anonymous) 2008-02-15 02:27 am (UTC)(link)As an aside, my first approximation to the rain problem would have been "ring" (dual meanings -- 1) circle 2)announcing ones presence on a phone or at a door). So "the rain was ringing the pools of water". But pocking is better.
TPWFL
Re: New IP so that should keep you guessing for about 20 seconds