I’m starting to slowly believe in the merits of fast-writing. It wasn’t always this way. I remember being told by a mentor that it takes 7 years to complete a book.
SEVEN YEARS? I remember thinking about that with astonishment. Back then, as an impatient 22-year old, it was hard to imagine 7 long years passing before I could complete anything great. I thought maybe I’d become more patient over time. Age is supposed to do that to you right?
Wrong. If anything, through the trials of trying to find my writing voice and doing free-writes, I have even less patience for the writing process. I’m at this place in my writing process where I have so many ideas and I just want to produce nearly every day. I can’t wait 7 years before I show anybody my work. Even worse, I’ve found that my narrative voice changes drastically month to month, day to day. There’s been too many times where I’ve left a piece for several months, believing that I’ll be ready to pick it back up again, only to find that I just can’t.
Take today for example. I’ve been working on Barrio Chases and boy, has it been an uphill battle. I’d originally written these vignettes as part of my senior project –a back story for the narrator’s parents. That was back in 2019. Granted, I’ve made some changes in the years since, but for the most part, the story has remained fairly faithful to its original composition. Still, 4 years have passed and though I have a warm place in my heart saved for these pieces, working through it again has been a real drag.
I attribute that mostly to improving as a writer. We’ve got to find some positive in this right? But I can feel my 22-year old writing style fighting against my current writing style. It feels like I’m a city planner, tasked with creating beautiful, flowing roads in a city whose roads cross diagonally and loop around bends that don’t make sense. Years ago, the former city planner had been well-meaning. In fact, that city planner was working with the best God damn city-planning techniques at the time. However, times have changed and we know better now, though that doesn’t make it any easier to creating something new out of what’s already there.
It is gratifying in some senses to see how far I’ve come. It’s wonderful to see that I make different writing moves than what I did years ago. I’ve come very far and I never gave up on writing (I never will, in fact). However, this is precisely why I believe in fast-writing: getting everything on the page and trying to produce things completely on a regular basis. Fast-writing gets you out of your head. It gets the word down on the page. And you’ll never have to contend with your former self in order to complete a story.
I’ve been watching Joyce Carol Oates’s Masterclass on The Art of the Short Story. She talks a lot about trying to get down a story in perhaps even one sitting. This is important, because when you finish your first draft, you get this very powerful feeling. I really like her Masterclass so far, because I think she essentially comes back to this idea at various points: the actual process of not getting discouraged as a writer. Especially as a new writer, it’s important to continually feel good and build up your confidence as much as you can. That comes from a myriad of places: finishing a short story, writing a 1st draft rapidly, capturing your daydreams.
I think this is part of the reason why I’m removing the second series of vignettes for Barrio Chases. Partially to finish my current vignette collection on time. Partially, because Barrio Chases is developing into a love story and it deserves more time (as all great love stories do). My hope is to create a second vignette collection and have the rest of Barrio Chases included there. Hopefully by that time, I can rewrite the story from a blanker slate, and I won’t be contending with my former narrative voice. I promise another 4 years won’t pass until I work on it.