Curbing Self-Indulgent Writing
I have written both professionally and on an amateur level for several years. A lot of it basically fell into my lap, and it hasn't been my primary profession for a couple of years now. I have some projects now that I'm interested in and working on in my off time, but I've noticed that a lot of my side projects quickly descend into metafiction. That's something I love when used by great writers, but I find it pretty off-putting in texts on the level I'm producing. It's certainly not something I'm interested in doing nearly as often as I do. Most of it just ends up in the bin on the first editing pass. The issue is that it sucks up valuable writing time.
I've been trying to stop it and redirect but that can derail me and make me lose momentum. Writing through it occasionally helps, but it can also end up just kind of spiraling. Does anyone has any advice for working on reducing or mitigating this sort of self-indulgent tendency?
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There is writing and there is storytelling. Writing is about the words. Storytelling is about the event, the people, the sights, sounds, smells, tragedies, joys, births, deaths, surprises, victories, and defeats. Writing does not matter except as a vehicle for telling the story.
It is very easy to feel productive by sitting down and churning out words. There are many writers who will tell you to just sit down and let the words flow and edit out all the bits that are not story later. I think that may work for the natural storytellers, the ones that don't have to work much on story because it just naturally flows out of them. But I'm guessing that if you find yourself descending into metafiction, you are not one of those, you are someone like me who needs to work harder on story. Metafiction is all about playing with the words and the conventions and the mechanisms of storytelling, rather than with story itself. It is a symptom of focusing on words rather than story.
So I would suggest focusing on story, on fully imagining a scene before you write it down. This is still about working in a disciplined fashion, about applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair. But it is not about producing words. It is about inventing stories. So sit down and invent stories. Work your imagination till each scene is fully formed, until you can see each character's eyes move and feel their breath on your cheek. Then write down what you see.
No one can say for sure what discipline will work for you. But it is pretty clear to me that for wordy types, sitting down and simply spinning out words is a way to fool yourself into thinking you are working while really avoiding the hard works of invention. An accumulation of useless words, particularly clever words, seem to me a sure sign of a mind focused on the wrong objective. (And I have produced a lot of them.)
Let go of the words. Live the story. Then write what you have seen.
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If you are writing and producing something, it's best not to squelch the process (as @what has stated). What I will say is it may be something which is not easily overcome and you may not want to overcome it. You will, however, want to limit it (which I guess is the basis of your question).
My suggestion to you is to set yourself either a certain time of the day for this or perhaps one single day out of the week. This will let the creativeness continue without stopping things up. If an hour in the morning will get it out of your system, then set that time aside to have at it. This may help get all of your creative juices flowing while still being able to follow it up with a very productive rest of the day. This would require a lot of discipline, but is very doable.
My alternative to this is to set an entire day in the week aside. It may be a little easier of a stop point in the writing to transition from being self-indulgent to getting proper work done. You are limited by your own biological rhythms. Sleep tends to do its thing!
In either case, I would highly suggest you not throw these episodes in the trash. Keep them around in the slush file (as @LaurenIpsum so aptly called it) to be reviewed later. You may find useful parts/pieces which can provide great story lines or ideas for later on. I often find when going over previous work new ideas come to mind. I usually think the work I'm reading is crap, but new ideas can still flow from it.
Work is work, whether self-indulgent or not. You've spent the time on it already. Hard drive storage (or even a thumb drive) is very cheap. Keeping these episodes on hand is never a bad thing. At the very least it can show your future self what not to be doing. Throwing work away is throwing your valuable time away. Not keeping it, whether the work is good or bad, is a complete waste.
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At some point, all fiction becomes self-conscious; not a big deal.
The most important question is: does the narrative and story flow well and easily? Is it lively? Are you getting your point across?
You can delete the self-indulgent stuff during edit. Or you may decide during editing that it is the most important part of the story! Don't worry about that; just be entertaining/witty/profound...
I typically find that the break-the-form/reflexive fiction/self-consciousness drops out naturally during edit stage of its own heaviness.
As far as wasting time, it's all a matter of degree and perspective. I tend to wonder if every time I sit to write something I am wasting my time. Nothing new about that! I sometimes do clean rough drafts, but sometimes my rough drafts contain a lot of wild stuff that I know is not going to remain. (I just don't know until I've finished the rough draft which wild stuff belongs in the final version).
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26025. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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