Why, as a writer, when you are near the end after months or even years of work, do you have to go through a period where you are convinced that everything you have written is worthless shit?
#writerscoffeeclub
63 posts33 participants3 posts today
#WritersCoffeeClub 28. Happy Respect Your Cat Day! Who or what accompanies you when you write?
My imagination. And about six billion browser tabs open to obscure wikipedia topics (and a few more abstruse sources).
The cat? She mostly observes from a distance between naps, but occasionally gets bored and comes over to bite my typing hands.
#WritersCoffeeClub 27 March: What's the strangest situation or place where you've written?
Unusual, rather than strange: in a nightclub, on my phone's notepad. 
#WritersCoffeeClub 27 Mar
What's the strangest situation or place you've ever written?
Oh come ON!
(I write SF/F, and the weirder the situation and places the better.)
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#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 26: About which format or style choices are you the most uncertain?
Chapter length. I really have no idea what I'm doing with chapters. I'm considering not bothering with them and just stringing hundreds of scenes together.
26. About which format or style choices are you the most uncertain?
I've learned that my favourite POV, close first present, isn't liked by many people for whatever reason. Doesn't make me uncertain, I write it anyway.
In general I'm uncertain about everything, but now I have an alpha and a beta reader (if I can get her out of hibernation) who help.
#WritersCoffeeClub Mar26 - About which format or style choices are you the most uncertain?
My books are set in the English Middle Ages. They really should be written in British English. But I'm an American. Rather than make dozens of stupid errors, I chose to write in my native tongue, American English. I'm still not certain it was a good choice.
#WritersCoffeeClub 26, About which format or style choices are you the most uncertain?
Second person future pluperfect tense made my headmeat bleed a little (there are a couple of paragraphs in that mode in "Palimpsest").
You will have had to try it before you will have understood why.
March 26: About which format or style choices are you the most uncertain?
None. I write how I like. It's the only way to write.
#WritersCoffeeClub About which format or style choices are you the most uncertain?
I am not fond of obscurantist style and the kind of writing that "sends reader to check a dictionary". I may use many kinds of language as character dialogue. But I try to work on my description, especially as far as exposition is concerned.
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#WritersCoffeeClub March 25: Describe your workflow if it had to be 100% analog.
Write on paper. Write scenes as separate little units. Put scenes in file folders. Rearrange scenes in folders and fill in missing ones as necessary.
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#WritersCoffeeClub Incidentally, I seem to recall that the original IBM Selectric golf-ball typewriter used internal mechanical binary coding and digital-to-analog converters to control the mechanism. So it fits the pre-digital and gives you what some folks have described as the best keyboard feel ever (at a price—the Selectric 3 cost about $1000 in 1981, or maybe $4000 today).
#WritersCoffeeClub 25 March: Describe your workflow if it had to be 100% analog.
Would an old skool typewriter count? 
Typewriter workflow.
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#WritersCoffeeClub Incidentally, I couldn't go back to the pre-computer era for writing. I don't absolutely need internet or web browser (though I pause to look stuff up online CONTINUOUSLY while writing), but I *do* need at minimum a text editor and the ability to see two windows/documents simultaneously. So, circa-1985 Protext on CP/M or equivalent. A circa-1990 286 PC with a hard drive and 1Mb of RAM running Coherent OS (a UNIX v7 clone) would be ideal.
#WritersCoffeeClub March 25: Describe your workflow if it had to be 100% analog.
Can't be done.
I mean, the mechanics of using a typewriter … it's how I started writing? But my publishers insist on electronic workflow—Word tracked changes for copy edits, PDF for page proof checks—and my agent and primary publisher are in the USA anyway. Postal turnaround given today's crappy services would add months to each book's production time. Plus, Scrivener makes me vastly more effective as an author.
#WritersCoffeeClub 25 March. Describe your workflow if it had to be 100% analog.
Pretty similar to now except I'd be tapping the keys of a typewriter rather than my computer.
My desk is always filled with scribbled notes and the all-important calendar of events, so that certainly wouldn't change.
I was born well before home computers. Born in the era of using real books, dictionaries, thesaurus, encyclopedia...lol
#WritersCoffeeClub 3/24. Is there a particular reader you keep in mind when you write?
Yes: I am VERY SPECIFICALLY writing the books for myself that nobody else is writing. I'm a bit of an outlier with lots of itches that nobody else is scratching, but not so much of an outlier that I don't have a cognitive tribe who also mostly enjoy the same things.
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#WritersCoffeeClub Mar 24: Is there a particular reader you keep in mind when you write?
I'm trying to resist that urge because there are two: the SFF/genre reader who's three steps ahead of me bc they know all the tropes, and the BIGOT sff/genre reader who's deliberately misreading everything I do in order to avoid all the "woke."
March 24: Is there a particular reader you keep in mind when you write?
Yes, me. If you write for someone else then you're just writing the story someone else wants. Not illegitimate but not what I'm about either.
#WritersCoffeeClub 24. Is there a particular reader you keep in mind when you write?
My fandom friends whose encouragement midwifed this whole endeavour and who continue to read and comment. They’re my '30 sickos.'
