Making it right.

I hope everyone had a beautiful, happy, healthy Christmas! Wow, 2014 is coming in about 4 days. I still can't quite wrap my mind around 2013...hahaha.

Anyways...here is a writing post.

So this post's title was actually something coherent this time (instead of me being all like, "ehhh....I'm too lazy to think so I'll just title it something creative like "cool stuff" or something specific along those lines). And...it's about me thinking about, ha, TeaNovel.

So...a few days ago (Christmas Eve, I believe) I wrote a blog post/review of Days of Blood and Starlight. Wasn't really a review--more like a rant/fangirl gush of me discovering Laini Taylor's genius. (I know, I'm quite late. But Dreams of Gods and Monsters, the third book, is only about 4 months away...which is still not really okay because LAINI, I NEED IT NOW.)

So of course, I want to know the genius behind the masterpiece, you know?

A writing friend recommended her blog to me a while ago during NaNo, but after reading her books, I did some more in-depth browsing and came across this blog post:

http://www.lainitaylor.com/2012/03/maybe-post-about-writing.html

It's a very, very good post.

Hilarious pictures aside, Laini talks about the writing process and getting it right, not getting it fast. She quotes advice from Patrick Rothfuss, "It will only be late once, but it will suck forever."

Here, she put it in caps and big font, so I will too.

IT WILL ONLY BE LATE ONCE, BUT IT WILL SUCK FOREVER. 

There? Okay. We can go on. I'll explain.

So basically, I was a teen when I wrote the TeaNovel. I still am a teen. Coming off multiple successes and bounties from NaNoWriMo, I always had the solid mentality of "Get it down, you can fix it later. Blindly throw crap at the wall and hope it sticks."

Which was good advice...for the first draft.

But numerous rewrites later, I still had the "Get it down, you can fix it later" mentality. I wanted to get it done. I was being so smug and everything, telling the few people I trusted, "Yeah. I rewrote the entire thing in a month."

Okay, so I still continued some of my successes. The plot improved drastically. Huge improvements and developments.

But the writing...not so much. I thought I was making so much progress, rewriting a scene over and over without slowing down, and when I got the plot down and it came down to the writing, I passed it off and I vowed that I would fix it later.

Without slowing down and paying attention to the writing, I thought I was finishing the story, but I was so focused on getting it down rather than getting it right, that the gap in the writing that I ignored came back to bite me in the ass, and I faced mountain after mountain of rewrites.

Let me rephrase it, in big font.

Because I was so focused on racing through it and getting it down, I thought I was finishing the story faster, but in reality I was setting myself up for more work in the end. 

This time, I'm doing my last edits on it. Plot is okay, but the writing needs a LOT of work.

THIS TIME, I WILL GET IT RIGHT.

But this time, I'll give it the time it needs. Maybe I'll take more than a month. Now as I'm getting nearer and nearer to the finish line I have set up for myself, it all comes down to the writing.

I will be careful. I will be meticulous and I will be gentle and delicate and intricate.

This time, I know I have it down. This time, I want to get it right.