As a Creator, Learn To Trust The Process

Creators are, by and large, cursed with an awareness of our own flaws... when it comes to our work, at least. While other people might read a passage and tell us how great it is, or listen to a song we wrote and gush about how much they love it, all we can see are the flaws in it. And while it is good to be honest about your work, it's also important to remember that being too critical of what you've made can often be like slamming on the brakes, preventing you from ever finishing anything.

A mantra that I've adopted for this (and that I'm sure you've all heard at least a few times in your life) is, "Trust the process." And in case you're wondering, it really does work.

As the old saying goes, you can't edit a blank page.

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Fixing It In Post

As some of my regular readers know, I've been working on audio dramas for the past year and change now. It's been a learning process as I try out different voices, different recording setups, acquire new equipment, learn new effects, and so on, and so forth. One of the biggest lessons I taught myself, though, was that when I messed up a line, or had to take a breath, or lost the character voice I was using in my reading was to just take a second, re-center myself, and do it again without scrapping the take and starting over again.

And every time I do this, I mentally tell myself, "Don't worry, I'll fix it in post."

For those who aren't familiar with this term's meaning, even if you've heard it before, "post" refers to "post-production," which means all the stuff you do to a recording after you've gotten the raw lines from your actors. It's when you cut out stumbles and stutters, remove the sounds of breath, white noise that crept into the background, etc. It's also where you add the voice effects, background music, sound effects, and all those other little elements that take a dramatic reading and turn it into an actual audio drama.

There's a lot that goes into this stage of the process, honestly... and it can be eye-opening how different the finished product will be from the raw recording you made. This is why when I'm listening to a take, even if it's not perfect, or there's little hiccoughs here and there, I no longer scrap it and start over immediately. Because even if you have humble ingredients to work with, the end result can still be great!

Also, if you want to help support bigger, more involved audio dramas from yours truly, please subscribe to the Azukail Games YouTube channel where my current pieces are, and check out "Windy City Shadows" A Chronicles of Darkness Podcast Proposal!

You Can't Edit a Blank Page

Where this all comes back around to writing again is that making these audio dramas reminded me of a lesson I learned very early on when it comes to telling stories; no matter how amazingly perfect it is in your mind, it is almost never that perfect on the page when you finally get it out. There's always going to be dialogue that feels stilted, or characters who need more development, or some scenes that just feel like filler, or plot hooks that need to be sharpened to really sink in to the reader.

Your first draft is never going to be perfect. Period, end of story. You're always going to have to fix some things in post... and you shouldn't be afraid of doing that.

Hmmm... yeah, I'm cutting this out. The café scene just isn't working.

As a whole, writers will acknowledge that editing is important. We have to do it, we say. But a lot of us don't really believe it. We think that surely our work is exemplary. Surely we'll just have a few typos, or a few grammar mistakes to fix, and that will be that. And while it's true that the more you do this, the better and better your early drafts become, you're always going to have to go through multiple stages to get the best possible result.

And sometimes when you're having trouble with a scene, or you can't get your dialogue just right, or the ending lines are giving you a fit, you just need to take a breath, re-center yourself, and say, "I'll fix it in post." Because writing a novel, just like making an audio drama, or a movie, or painting a miniature, isn't just one thing. It's a series of steps that all add up to a complete whole.

It is a process.

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That's all for this week's Craft of Writing! For more of my work, check out my Vocal archive, or at My Amazon Author Page where you can find books like my sci-fi dystopian thriller Old Soldiers, my sword and sorcery novel Crier's Knife, or my most recent short story collection The Rejects!

 

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