What do you see, Carter?

[callunav]

Reading (rereading) Patricia McKillip makes me want to start writing again, but I've grown mistrustful of my ability to write.

That's a little painful, since I first formed the ambition to write fiction when I was 7 (after my first adventure in doing so), continued to believe it would be my profession until 17, and continued to understand it to be an intrinsic part of my identity until...when? Sometime last year, when I first found myself reading good writing, snagging on a perfect image or a great turn of phrase, and thinking, "I would never have thought to write that"? Before that? I'm not sure.

It's still drifting somewhere in my identity, I think, but waterlogged with uncertainty.

Comments

[julian]

Like, write on the sentence-level, or plot?

'cause sentence-level, you're still gorgeous. Although I'm aware this is an internal thing.

[callunav]

It is definitely an internal thing, although of course that's a nice thing to hear, regardless.

I'm having a hard time expressing it - or rather, a hard time understanding it in clear detail, for myself. I plot better now than I did when I was actively writing, when I'm thinking about bits of stories I might write. Similarly, my characterization seems to me to be getting more varied and believable - in the things I never write down. My sentence-to-sentence writing is often convoluted, but that's something I'm able to perceive when I reread and (mostly) fix. Otherwise, I know it's at least competent (which is actually not, for me, faint praise) and sometimes more. Dialogue has been the one thing I've never worried about. Description has always been weak for me, and I think it still is/would be, but that's no different from before - although perhaps it bothers me more now because I'm appreciating good description in other people's writing more, and more actively.

I think some of it has to do with description and using imagery deftly and effectively. More of it has to do with a nebulous, global sense of everything clicking and hanging together well, which is for me the difference between something that's nice and something I might love. And I think maybe I've read too many things I've been able to love to be satisfied with nice. It doesn't have to be something other people would think was more than nice, though of course that would be, well, nice. But it needs to at least make me solidly happy, and I'm no longer sure I know how to do that. I can't tell if that's because I suspect my writing has gotten less good, or just that my reading and maturing ability to think critically about what I read is setting the bar higher.