i'm going to start keeping track of all these musings, because i keep getting fucked over by the same mistakes, and hopefully this will put a stop to all that!



it's those emotional times that clash with the writer's logic that screws with your mind. for example, when you know what's wrong with the phrase/line but you just can't change it, because you need it like that for effect/emphasis, and if you change it, it'll either destroy the impact (like a fucked up chemical reaction because the potential energy isn't enough) or it'll leave holes in the structure. for me, structure is just so fucking important. where the line breaks go and how punctuation is used can change the mood of something in a flash, and it's so damn hard to control. on the one hand, you can't reign it in completely, because then it wouldn't come out as mind-blowing as your original intent. on the other hand, you can't have no control over it, and the wrong balance of control really screws things up. but then, sometimes i don't know how i want it to be until i'm done writing, and then there are things i've done subconsciously that i can't change because the flow wouldn't be right, or it would fuck up the structure (which always comes out well if i just do it all in a rush instead of meticulously rearranging words), which means i'd have to start over. if the line breaks are wrong, then the emphasis is wrong. if the emphasis isn't on the right line or words or phrases, then there is no overall effect. even if there was an effect, it wouldn't nearly be as strong of a hit as if i hadn't changed anything in the first place. but obviously, if i didn't change anything in the first place, the structural holes would be so damn obvious! and the content would have to be adjusted if i want to put in new words to fix the hole. basically if i mess up somewhere on structure first time through, i either start from scratch (and starting from scratch when you're already emotionally depleted is useless) or spend forever finding a way to fix it without being too obvious about maybe having edited it millions of times. not that there's anything wrong with that, but then it becomes so much more controlled and... well, that defeats the purpose of writing real. i always want to just write without thinking, but sometimes it's easy to upset the precarious structural balance of the writing. because i write uncontrollably and all these things flood in my head, and i have to make sense of them one at a time. but not too slowly either. does this even make sense? it has to be just right.

this doesn't happen to me all the time, but when it does, it's so frustrating that i don't know how to fix it. i'm sure really talented people don't go through this kind of shit, so i'm really curious about maybe learning some way around this. and i'm my worst critic, so nothing i write is ever good enough anyway. yeah, i'll be proud of some things, but after awhile (like, maybe after reading it 100 times) i'll start seeing little mistakes and flaws. and i can never bring myself to fix them because then, it wouldn't be original. yeah, i have a problem with people who go back a year later to edit something they wrote during the spur of the moment.

thank god papers aren't this hard.