A friend of mine told me that he does most of his work before he puts a word on paper. When he wants an idea, he waits for inspiration. Next, he works out the idea in his head. Then, he waits for more inspiration for the actual prose. I'm WAYYY too much of a control freak for that :)
So while he's been contemplating, I've been churning out material as fast as I could. Now I've got a few hundred thousand words of crappy to semi-crappy to fairly good material.
The bad thing about that material is: the harder I work, the more I improve, and the more I improve, the more I'm horrified by its glaring, obvious flaws.
The good thing about that material is: the more horrific those flaws seem, the prouder I am of how much I've since improved, and how much I've learned.
Only now, I've run up against a bit of a wall- I can see something's wrong with my draft, but I'm just not good enough yet to recognize exactly what it is and how to fix it. So, I've looked at some how-to writing books and (surprisingly?) they've been a HUGE help!
When I was having a terrible time getting started, books like Stephen King's On Writing, Carolyn See's Making a Literary Life, and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird inspired me to bite the bullet.
Now that my state of mind is pretty good, but the nuts and bolts of my writing could use some work, I've been checking out books like Writing the Blockbuster Novel by Albert Zuckerman (which was VERY helpful), How to Write a Damn Good Mystery by James N. Frey.
These books are technical guides at heart, with concrete suggestions for how to fix concrete problems (like lax plotting or a claustrophobic focus, etc). I find these books MUCH more helpful than the kind that talk about making writing "sing" and "come to life."
Whenever those phrases pop up- which they do a lot, both among writers and in books about writing- I shut down. What the hell do those things MEAN, anyway?
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