Sandra’s Philosophy on Writing.

Yup that’s right, I haven’t even finished my first novel to completion (Still battling the Dread Pirate Rewrites) but I already have a writing philosophy… in fact, it is more like a philosophy on life.

Here she goes…

Picture this: A kindergartener, sitting on the floor of his classroom in his Osh Kibosh Goulash overalls with a pile of building blocks in front of him. He runs his pudgy fingers over them, beats them together. He messes them up, liking the noise they make when they hit each other. His teacher notices that he’s just sitting there with the blocks but he isn’t building anything. She winds her way through the maze of other children sitting on the floor and gently suggests to our kindergartener that he build a wall with his blocks. Seems harmless enough—a gentle push in a direction of learning, right? WRONG! She may have just squashed any creativity the child would ever have with building blocks. Now he associates them with building a wall, and he didn’t make this association himself, someone else gave it to him. It is very possible that the child would come up with building a wall all on his own, but maybe the blocks weren’t for building to him, maybe they were for making music, or creating art, like a mosaic.

Teach your children HOW to think, not WHAT to think.

And what, all powerful ranting author blogger lady, does this have to do with writing, you ask?

Everything.

I don’t want someone telling me that I need a plot point on a certain page of my book—then I will forever associate that page with a plot point, when it may very well be the case that my story doesn’t work with a plot point there. But it will be ruined forever. Which is why I don’t read rules to writing—grammar sure, you have to have grammar if you want anyone to understand what you write, let alone getting published. But I don’t let grammar slow me down. Grammar can be fixed after the fact, which is what I am currently doing.

Perhaps the process would’ve been quicker had I just learned grammar before hand. However, if I was spending my time thinking about grammar, and less about the story, it wouldn’t matter how great the grammar is, if the story sucks, it sucks, whether it’s written coherently or not. But if you have a great story with bad grammar, isn’t that a problem too? YES, but poor grammar is easy to fix, a broken story isn’t.

I don’t take any chances with my muse… okay I just lied there. In the beginning, I did take some chances, although I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I sent some chapters out for critique before I had even finished the rough draft. A mistake in the long run, perhaps. I did get some helpful advice, like SHOW NOT TELL, but overall I think it made me a little neurotic and set me back. I know not to do that anymore. I know to trust my instincts as a story teller. It’s my story to tell, only I know how to tell it. Once I have the story down in black and white, then is time for me to take a step back and look at it with a discerning eye. Like I am currently doing. I am not opposed to criticism, in fact I welcome it, seek it out even. I know I am crippled by knowing what every character is thinking and where the story is headed, so I need someone who doesn’t.