When does it end?

Actually a particularly fine specimen!

Inspired by Gloup's 'A Super Girl's Dilemma', I've resumed work on a superhero spanking story of my own - it's just reached the stage of reading and re-reading where I'm 'tweaking' the text - adding detail, changing a word here and there for a more descriptive one, rearranging phrases so the sentences flow more smoothly, and so on. Once I've reached a point where I'm satisfied with the story (or can't see any way of improving it short of rewriting the whole thing), I'll leave it for a week or two so I can read it with relatively fresh eyes, and spot any errors I might have missed, before sending it in.

I sometimes think of story-writing as being like baking - you start with an idea and a few basic ingredients. Once you've formed your 'dough' you can keep working and reshaping it, maybe adding extra ingredients, until it's time to put it in the oven and bake it into it's final form. Only when it's served to the readers, and comments come in, do you discover whether it's to their taste or not...!

Good to know others amend their stories even after publication. I have a hard time finding typos and grammatical errors if reading my story on the computer in my word processing program. To assist me I forward the story to my Kindle and read it in a totally different location in the house. I then make notations and when back at the computer revise it. I tend to keep each version of the story simply titling it revision 1, 2, etc. Happy writing and reading all.

Keeping all those revisions, Fred, will in due course make your literary biographer very happy.

I genuinely regret that a combination of laziness and technology means that I only ever, except accidentally, have a published version and a "current final" version.

Geoffrey.

Not to beat about the bush, and I may not have precisely the right term here, but what I really meant was using the kinds of words and phrases that may sometimes dilute my meaning, rather than just saying it straight, as it were.

It's a kind of habit of mind I may have, perhaps a symptom of self-doubt or insecurity, pretty easy to fall into quite often if you're prone to verbosity as I mostly am.

Do you get the general idea?

I think I follow now. With writing being art, we sometimes paint that 'happy little tree' in a place that the reader might not understand or relate to. I remember Stephen King accusing JK Rowling of being an insecure writer in that she explained too much and didn't leave enough for the reader to decode on their own. I think there may be some validity to this, but that opens up another long standing debate, do I write for me or for my audience?

Am I close?

'Hedge' dictionary definition: to limit or qualify (something) by conditions or exceptions. Or: a word or phrase that makes what you say less strong.

Over-explaining is a different problem, which plagues my writing as well, though I'm able to edit it out on a read-through sometimes by asking myself "Is this word/phrase/sentence necessary? Does it add anything the reader needs to know or feel?"

Re audience: we're all our own first audience, aren't we? (Personally, I never write only for myself - and maybe people are kidding themselves if they claim otherwise.)

It's the key issue for all writers: who is your audience, and how much do you shape your writing to accommodate them? Readers' literacy levels vary from Elementary school to Ph.D professordom. What level you pitch your writing at in terms of complexity of plot, subtlety of character, density of style, type of vocabulary is your choice. I imagine most of us aim at readers pretty much like ourselves.

So...what's over-explaining for one reader is needed for another, and JK Rowling, to be fair, was writing for 10 year-olds.

I admire and enjoy novels by writers like Virginia Woolf, even though not much happens and some passages are so densely expressed that their meaning is beyond me. It can feel like hard work, and I wouldn't bother if there wasn't enough else there to engage and entertain me, but sometimes she blows your mind with totally sublime prose. She wasn't writing for a mass readership (I assume), but she did okay.

When I wrote my first spanking story, I thought I was writing for myself as some kind of self-therapy, but as I was very happy when I found a place I could publish it, I may have been kidding myself.


May I ask an even more elementary question: What is there to explain? When I was younger, I thought a writer always had a perfect grasp of her story, that she would know everything that happened even off-screen, and that she would definitely know the motivations of all the characters. Even if I couldn't figure it out, she would definitely know if A was in love with B or not. Now, as a "writer", I must admit that I very often have no idea of what is going on - I write on instinct and intuition, and I go with the flow of where the story carries me (perhaps I have read too much Virginia Woolf?). I may have theories about my characters motives, but I don't feel that these theories are necessarily more well-founded than all the theories I have about the motives of real persons in my life. So I don't really feel that I explain at all; it much closer to say that I describe and explore - and if I sometimes feel that I reach a conclusion, I cannot really explain that conclusion in other ways than retelling the story.

I'll disagree. But maybe I should hedge. Why do people journal or keep a diary? Why would you lock a diary? There is value in writing for yourself. It can be like screaming into a empty room. It can be a way of getting it out of your system. But still keeping it hidden. It can also, like a photograph, be a way to preserve a moment in time.

Even when I'm journaling, I may edit. I don't write in ink. So if I get something wrong, it's easy to correct.

I think, when you "post", that's when you become an author. You may want validation for either content or writing ability. That's when editing becomes important. Editing is also a skill. A skill you have to develop.

Goodgulf gave some sound advise, "to let the story age out of my mind" before editing. Otherwise, his mind may fill in missing words or get lost in syntax(?). Sometimes, when a story is fresh in my mind, the original 'competes' with the changes I want to make.

I totally agree, and thank you for correcting me. I suppose I was talking specifically about writing spanking fiction - and even with that (Alef's comments above reminded me), there was a short time when it was only for myself (the time before I remembered visiting the LSF and realised I might be able to post my writing there).

Another question, then, Noah, is:

Do you count your future self (for whom, presumably, the diary/journal is written and locked) as YOU, or is he/she a different person and therefore an audience other than yourself (as it were)?