Scifi, Monsters, and Survival:
Author Ariele Sieling’s Blog
Did you know my dad is a beekeeper? I’ve written some stuff about bees. Have an incomplete work in progress about a beekeeper. Had a short personal essay published in Beekeeping Magazine! Fun stuff.
Anyway, in this vlog, I ramble about my experiences with beekeeping! I miss doing it, and hope at some point in the future to connect with some beekeepers, so I can do some of the beekeeping stuff without all the responsibility. We’ll see.
You’ve heard of writing. You’ve heard of rewriting. But what about unwriting?
Imagine you’re drafting a story. Perhaps you’re in the outline phase, figuring out the course of events. Or maybe you’re a pantser, so you’re just writing along, watching as the story unfolds before you.
At a certain point, the process becomes more and more difficult. Something feels wrong. It feels off.
What do you do?
Different writers will make different choices at this juncture. Some might throw up their hands in frustration at the fickleness of the creative muse. Some might complain of writer’s block. Some might reread. Some might take a break. Some might push forward no matter what.
There’s nothing wrong with any of these approaches, especially if one of them breaks open the dam for you.
But there is another choice that I like to call unwriting.
Many times, the writing becomes difficult because at an earlier point in the narrative, we made the wrong choice. Or the worse choice.
The characters don’t want to go the direction you’re pushing them. There are too many plot holes. Gaps. Complexities.
Unwriting is the process of working backward from your current point, unspooling it, so to speak, to find the point at which the narrative went off track, and then eliminating all the parts of the story that no longer fit and rewriting from that pivotal point.
It’s like dropping a stitch when you’re knitting, and having to count backwards to figure out where it went wrong.
I think. I don’t knit, lol, so I’m just guessing that this metaphor makes sense.
Unwriting sometimes can mean rewriting a completely new scene or chapter. But it doesn’t always. Sometimes it means taking a few key moments, visuals, or dialogue, and drafting new transitions and scenery around them. Sometimes it means keeping the scenery and replacing the character with a new one. It might mean blending currently written elements with new ones, or completely rewriting the section. Or sometimes, it just means rewriting one thing in the beginning to redirect the flow of the story, and keeping everything else.
It's a process of unraveling and reweaving.
It looks different for everyone.
The key to successful unwriting, in my estimation, is to recognize the emotional element. It can be really hard to let go of the hours and effort put into drafting a scene, chapter, or section of a story. And the idea of deleting entire sections or reweaving the entire thing can be exhausting or disappointing.
But it’s not a negative process. In fact, it’s a positive. It’s a process of polishing and sanding, making the rough product better and more beautiful. It’s not really going backward, though it can sometimes feel like that. It’s one path forward to creating the best story possible.
Anyone who’s been around for a while knows I’m obsessed with philosophy. Specifically, I’m obsessed with absurdity, which is a (not) subset of existentialism and written about by Albert Camus in his book The Myth of Sisyphus. You may also be familiar with Camus’s novels, The Stranger and The Plague. In my opinion, The Stranger is more about reaching absurdism through (really weird) lived experience, and how a person might get there intellectually. The Plague is a sort of exploration about how absurdism manifests across a range of people with different lived experiences, and how different types of people deal when facing absurdity. Some reach for religion, some create their own meaning, and some just keep shoving that rock uphill.
Anyway, obviously I’m going to have some poems about philosophy.
This one is specifically about absurdism, and grappling with the meaninglessness of life in the context of absurdism.
The desperate desire
craving
yearning
to know why—
Isn’t it absurd
in the context of
infinity
eternity
to presume that something
as small as I
would ever know
why?
The relentless dissonance
resounds in my mind:
the yearning to know
that which is unknowable—
because it does not exist.
Sometimes I like to think of writing as an endurance sport. It’s more like running a marathon than a sprint. It’s more like swimming the mile than … one of the shorter ones lol. It’s more like walking for days than around the block. Sure, you can go faster and slower. You might take days off to rest. But ultimately, the real skill is in keeping going. And going and going. And prioritizing your health and wellness. And recognizing that writing is a craft that requires time, effort, dedication, and endurance to grow.
There’s a lot of pressure in the writing industry to publish. Have you noticed? Especially now that self-publishing is so easy.
If you go to a conference, a common question is, “Are you published?” and “How many books do you have out?”
The more books I publish, the more awkward this conversation becomes for me. “How many?” usually follows. More and more, I’ve begun saying, “a few,” and trying to change the topic quickly.
Because the number of books an author has published, while certainly an achievement regardless of the number, is not the only way to measure the success, experience, or skill of a writer. Nor is income. Or awards.
So if publishing doesn’t guarantee you success, nor function as an indicator of your skill, should you publish at all? Why?
There are lots of reasons to publish, of course, first and foremost being, “I want to.” But you might also want to try to make money from your work. Maybe you want a larger audience. Maybe you enjoy the publishing process or get a sense of satisfaction from putting a book out. Maybe you like the idea of calling yourself a published author. Maybe it’s a dream you’ve always had.
But publishing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be either. There are a lot of people and companies out there trying to make money on writers who just want a published book. There are scam artists and publishers who will charge you an obscene amount of money and provide you with a poor-quality product. There are issues around copyright and reviews, criticism and critique, money and rules. So many rules for every distributor, marketing company, and designer.
That, and it's a lot of work. Whether you publish traditionally or indie, it is a labor-intensive process. And not a process that always brings a writer any particular amount of joy.
So let me just say this.
You don’t have to publish.
Personally, I think “I want to,” is a good enough reason to do so. But if you don’t want to, why are you doing it? What do you hope to get out of it?
And if the reason is, “Because I’m supposed to,” or "Someone told me I should," I’d invite you to take another look at that. Question it. Dissect it.
What else in life do you do “because you’re supposed to”? Why? What have you stopped doing because you realized it was dumb?
You don’t have to publish. If you want to, great! I’m all about it. I like publishing. I do it all the time.
But you don’t have to. If someone says you do, they’re wrong.
Publish if you want. Publish because it helps you pursue your goals.
Don’t publish if you don’t want to. You can always write for the love of it without all the extra crap.
You do you. And don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.
