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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26009
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/26009
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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.

Original score: 8