How to deal with hating your own stories until they're done

I've said before (wayyy back when I first started doing this) I didn't care much for Robert Olen Butler's From Where You Dream, even though it's one of the most frequently cited books of advice on writing fiction. Essentially, I found Butler's advice rather broad and more pointed at what he thought good writing looked like than how to get there. It had some useful advice, but that advice was punctuated by a lot of Butler's own aesthetics.

Still, I took one thing from reading that book that's stayed with me, which is the notion that writing is akin to a kind of lucid dreaming. You have to try to arrange your life so you can recall your dreams as close to how they happened as possible. Butler advised writing in the morning when the mind was still in a pre-verbal/logical state (sort of akin to having a pad of paper by the bed to dash down notes on your dreams before they fade away).

I've found there is a lot of truth to the idea that writing a story is like wrangling a dream on paper. It's the strongest argument for not having a day job and committing yourself fully to writing; that's the only way to be sure that when the muse hands you a vision, you're able to immediately transfer it onto paper. If you can't afford to quit your day job, though, I don't think you need to despair. There are plenty of ways to deal with muses. I've found my muse to be pretty reasonable about my timeliness in transferring her visions to paper. If I write down a few lines to remind myself what I saw, I can start the real rough draft sometime later. (Usually in the late evening or early morning before work. The best time to work is late Friday night on into Saturday morning.)

Dream hangover

There are more kinds of dream-states than just the ones that visit you during REM sleep. There is day-dreaming. I think most of my stories come to me as day-dreams. There is also that manic kind of late-night thought where you feel you've suddenly found all the answers to everything. Writing, especially first-draft writing, feels a lot like this 3 AM kind of thinking (not surprising, since often, at least for me, I literally am writing at 3 AM).

3 AM thinking feels very powerful when you're in the middle of it. Maybe because the brain thinks it should be dreaming at that time, you're in a place where dreams and the real world collide, and suddenly, the obstacles that were blocking your thought are obliterated. It's a very creative time. 3 AM thinking is free-write, first-draft thinking, when you're just going with the visions or voices in your head.

Of course, 3 AM thinking doesn't always seem so sound the next day. We've all been where Jerry Maguire was, wishing to God the next day we hadn't listened so much to the 3 AM voices in our heads.

When writing a story, the advice generally goes to just get the first draft on paper. It doesn't matter if it's garbage; at least you can work with garbage. You can't work with nothing. So write something. Write drunk, edit sober--that kind of advice.

It's not bad advice, but there's a point where it can be problematic for a writer. In fact, it's the point where I'd say most of my story ideas die. It's rare I can write even a short story all in one go. If an average short story is, say, 5,000 words or so, then it's going to have at least a couple of acts. Usually, the muse-given vision that got me sitting at my desk in the first place only covers one of those acts. After that, I need to wait for more inspiration.

The problem comes when I'm waiting to figure out how to continue the story from one act to the next. Often, I have to wait a while. In order to keep my brain working on the problem of how to continue the story, I have to go back and re-read what I have so far. And that's when my logical, analytic brain seizes up in horror at the mess I've got going so far. My whole brain shuts down--both the logical and the imaginative parts--because I've got such a pile of shit going on, and I don't want to just keep piling more shit on top of it.

Two ways to deal with the horror of your own partial rough drafts

There are two ways you can deal with this. You can try, as much as possible, to avoid looking at your work as you go. I do this sometimes. Even if it takes me five or six different sessions at the computer to write a story, each time I start a new one, I won't read much more than the last few sentences of where I left off. The advantage of doing this is that your critically-oriented mind doesn't slow you down. You can keep plodding forward until you've at least got something you can work with. The idea is that you write the rough draft uncritically, then look at the whole thing critically when it's done. At that point, you do some major work to re-imagine the thing, at which point the non-critical, creative side comes back in to make a new draft, but one that's got some stricter limits to it imposed by the critical brain. You keep going back and forth between these two until you get a draft that's polished.

The problem with this is that by the time you've written 5,000 words in dreamland, you can sometimes have such a mess that the whole thing was a waste of time. It's very demoralizing to write 5,000 words for no reason. I know writers will tell you that this is normal, or that maybe those 5,000 words weren't really a waste and you might reuse them somewhere down the line, but the fact is that there in the moment, it's a very sobering thing to realize your brilliant dream thoughts were gibberish.

So you can try another approach, which is kind of the opposite of the first one. You can overload yourself with reading and re-reading the drafts you've created. While you're waiting to figure out how you want to proceed, you can just keep going over and over the rough draft. Edit it. Whack at it. Or don't. The important thing is to just keep immersing yourself in it, because what it will do is make you somewhat immune to the gut feeling of how bad parts of it are. It's like getting used to a smell. Not that you want that smell to stay in your writing when you're finally done with the whole thing, but you do want to have developed the ability to at least work around the smell without getting sick to your stomach.

I tried both approaches this month with two new stories I wrote that I'm pretty excited about. Both approaches worked. I used the second approach with the longer of the two stories, because the length of the story meant there was no way to get around needing to go back over and over again to earlier passages so I could keep it all straight. Since I had to keep looking back anyway, I figured I would just keep re-reading what I'd done so far. After a while, it started to feel like I was working on someone else's work. I had distance from it, which meant I could be more objective. The shorter of the two stories, I just kept leaving myself an unfinished sentence as I wrapped up each session at the computer so I'd have an easy thing to get me going next time. The result was that I ended up getting through the story quickly, so at least the dream-feel of the entire story's first draft felt somewhat consistent.

I think either extreme will work. You'll have to try both yourself and see what works with your temperament. Either way, the goal is to get past your own "this is shit" sensors, at least until you've had enough of a chance to give those sensors a complete story to complain about.