The Story of the Story of Spring Is Dumb · 3:02pm May 22nd, 2017
Hey! It’s been a while. Things are good. How are you? Butterflies and smooches all around.
On to the point, the Royal Canterlot Library recently hosted a “Correct the Record” contest. Something about featuring stories by authors who have already been featured on RCL that better represent those authors’ something than their previously featured stories. Spring Is Dumb was nominated, but didn’t win anything. And then someone else was more humble than me, so Spring is Dumb got third place anyway! Hooray for technicalities!
The RCL feature has been up for a while, and you can find it here.
While writing a little commentary for the RCL thing, I reread Spring Is Dumb for the first time in a long time, and I also did a lot of thinking about when and why and how I wrote it. I tracked down Spring Is Dumb’s original first outline, early drafts, comments from prereaders, etc.
I’ve always been disappointed that we never get ‘Making ofs’ of stories. Great writers aren’t great writers. Great writers are great revisers. Great stories are made of chopping up junker stories and piecing them together into something better. But you rarely get any sense of that from reading the final polished product. Every story begins life sucky, but every story can become good with revision. The hard part is figuring out how. You can emulate good writing, because it’s up on display for everyone to see. But you can’t emulate the steps that lead to good writing, because those all happen backstage.
I thought it would be a fun experiment to compile all the notes and drafts of Spring Is Dumb, from conception to publication, and examine how it changed over time.
Unfortunately, Spring Is Dumb was a bad choice for this experiment, because there aren’t a lot of notes and drafts to it. It was published very soon after the writing first started. It never went through any major revisions. Prereaders had almost nothing but good things to say about it. Even a lot of their minor suggestions for edits went ignored. Really, all of this is to the final product’s detriment.
More time to simmer in the pot, a few more naysayers early on, and a greater willingness to make changes would have made for a much better story. Not to say that Spring is Dumb is bad, but… honestly, the more I’ve re-submerged myself in this story and its creation, the more its faults far outshine its strengths.
But I’ve already spent the time putting all this together, and just as many lessons can be learned from the writing of failed story as a successful one. Whichever you believe Spring Is Dumb to be, failure or success, I think this is something worth looking at.
Tomorrow, I’ll be posting the first of three parts of the full Story of the Story of Spring Is Dumb. From inspiration to publication, it’ll go from influences, to scans of the first handwritten outline, through each and every single draft, every big and small revision, comments from prereaders, and so on. The entire shebang will be documented, the whole messy affair laid bare. If a rigorous, tediously-detailed examination of the entire writing process for a single silly ship fic sounds like fun to you, stop on by!
First of three, because it’s ended up a bulky rambling monster that’s just too big to fit comfortably in the space of only one post.
Tomorrow’s first part will be Outlining Is Dumb, which discusses story genesis and the first outline. Second will be Writing Is Dumb, which follows the writing of the full first draft, from start to finish. Third will be Revising Is Dumb, which includes selected comments from the story’s prereaders and revisions made in response. Finally, at the end I’ve written a short conclusion addressing the Big Question—Just what the hell is the meaning of life anyway?
In other news, I’m going to be updating Some Hugs Last Longer Than Others soon. More on that later.
Peace out.
This is something I've argued with some friends of mine a lot -- writers always think less of themselves than their audience, 'cause the readers see the final product of a story and nothing else. Writers get to see the first draft, and how it improves little by little. So you think of yourself as a shitty writer, and everybody else thinks you're a magician with words.
It's a funny thing, really. Looking forward to that three-part analysis, I'm sure it'll be great. And Spring is Dumb absolutely deserved the re-feature; I'm super glad it won. Neat to see you back!
This is cool.
I always like to see the behind-the-scenes/postmortem/creator thoughts/etc too, and they're the reason I read the PFV, and now RCL, interviews, as well as why I started commenting on stories at all. The slice of insight from authors about how their work came to be makes it all the more interesting as a whole.
I await the special features.
So glad to see you back around these parts! I always enjoyed your work, and look forward to this "making of" series, as an amateurish, terrible author myself.
Are you still working on original fiction? How is that going? I hope, well.
Seeing the process will be intersting.
Updating "Some Hugs Last Longer than Others" is a great bit of news.
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Thank you! I've only just read Evil is Easy, Governing is Harder and it's some great stuff. Very happy to see the two together!
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Very well, thank you! I've got some original fiction work forthcoming in a couple quiet corners of the internet publishing world. I'll probably update here when they're actually published.
Looking forward to reading about the making of Spring is Dumb. It's always nice to get a behind the scenes look at other authors' story creation processes.
Also, definitely post here when your original fiction gets published. I know I'd definitely be interested in reading it.
Most of the time, the reason we as readers don't see documentaries or thorough walkthroughs of the writing process is because it is immeasurably boring and uneventfully iterative. Only a massive nerd with entirely too much time on their hands would document such a tedious process.
Of course, learning from the mistakes and successes of others can be a valuable way to improve oneself. I've written a few walkthroughs of stories which I failed to publish for being bad, and some people seemed to find it interesting.
If you truly are a massive nerd with entirely too much time on their hands, then I look forward to your documentation of the tedious writing process. This is a sincere complement, I swear.
Really looking forward to this. Thanks for putting yourself through it.