On 10/19/97 8:54 AM, The Eternal Lost Lurker at 
EternalLostLurker@worldnet.att.net wrote:

1) Patience?   Have you HEARD these people when you take a hiatus on a

fic

series?  I'm not Zen/Lurker...when people complain, I feel guilty.  I

don't

like leaving things unfinished.  If I can't hack at tleast a paragraph

out,

I feel bad.  It doesn't have to be a good paragraph, just a paragraph.

HEY! You act like I don't care when people complain! That's not the case! I
feel guilty, but I have a stronger force to balance out the guilt:
integrity. I can live with the guilt if I know that trying to finish the
fic at a given time is only going to produce frustration and a substandard
product. I don't write something if I know that I'm about to put out a
piece of garbage. I only write when I know I'm primed for top quality.

Hmmm. Well, bearing in mind that "There is no one true way to write"... 
I've been on mailing lists and discussion groups with several 
professional authors, including midlist writers like Pamela Dean, 
Patricia Wrede and John DeChancie. And the usual response to this 
suggestion is that you should keep plugging along... especially if you 
want to go professional. Professional writers don't have the luxury of 
waiting 'till inspiration strikes; to make the rent payment, they have to 
keep writing, keep producing, without regard to 'mood.' And, in fact, 
most of them say that going back a month or two later, they can't 
objectively tell that the stuff they wrote feeling it was crap was any 
worse than the stuff they wrote feeling it was gospel.

The same thing holds true in spades in journalism, where I got a lot of 
my writing training. When you're writing on deadline, you *can't* wait 
for the mood to strike, or even spend a lot of time fiddling around for 
the exact wording; you have to write fast and dirty, do a revision to 
clean up as best you can, and send it on to the editor's desk. Mike, 
what've your experiences been like in this respect? :)


Travis Butler
(The Professor, formerly of Myth and Magick!, Lawrence, KS;
 tbutler@tfs.net, now from the Wandering Powerbook;
 <http://www.tfs.net/personal/tbutler/>;
 Mac page <http://www.tfs.net/business/tbutler/>)

...Wait a minute! Strike that. Reverse it. Thank you.