小说与文学2011nytimes.com编辑精选
作家为什么会放弃自己的小说？
Why Do Writers Abandon Novels?
导读
这篇文章讨论写作者为什么会中途放弃长篇小说：开头总是满怀构想与雄心，到后期却被细节、自我怀疑和疲惫消磨殆尽。对任何正在写长篇的人都有用：它把“放弃”从一个道德问题，还原成一种可以预判、可以提前防范的创作阶段。
可以直接用的写作要点
- 01
把“写完”和“写好”拆成两个阶段：先允许自己交出一版糟糕的完稿，再进入打磨，否则永远停在第一章。
- 02
长篇后期容易陷入排版、措辞、细节的无限微调，警惕用“再改改”代替“往前写”。
- 03
记下最初想写这个故事的原因，在疲惫期回看，提醒自己当初的热情来自哪里。
- 04
被新点子分心、怀疑题材没人看，是放弃的两大常见原因；给自己固定不可挪用的写作时间，把新点子先记进另一个文件。
HN 评论精选
长项目后期会被琐碎的完美主义吞噬，热情耗尽比灵感枯竭更常见。
我不了解小说，但我了解博士论文。开始时你有绝佳的构想、很高的期望，想做出了不起的东西；到最后你只想赶紧甩掉这个鬼东西往前走。细节的纠缠、无关紧要的吹毛求疵、图表摆在哪、文字怎么对齐、读起来硌人的措辞——为了更准确更精确而选，结果却冒犯了爱好优美文笔的人。我猜小说大概也一样。相比之下写代码简直直白得多。
RiderOfGiraffes查看英文原文
I don't know about novels, but I do know about a Ph.D. thesis. You start with great ideas, high hopes, and an intention to produce something wonderful. By the end you're just desperate to get shot of the damn thing and move on. The level of detail, the irrelevant nit-picking, the positioning of the diagrams, the alignment of the text, the wording that jars the senses, chosen to be more correct and more precise, but nevertheless an insult to the lover of decent prose, and so on. I can imagine that a novel is the same, and to quote transmit101: > Coding is pretty straight-forward in comparison. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2313149) Yes. Yes it is. And to reply to beaumartinez who said: > I find coding elicits the same things > you've mentioned about composing. Perhaps, but unless you've experienced both, it's hard to appreciate the sheer intensity. Many people express doubt without themselves having the experience.
完成作品最消耗的是自信与耐力，而不只是技术能力。
我不了解小说，但写完一首曲子是件极其艰苦的事。我没找到过另一件如此有挑战性的事：它逼你直面自己到底想做出什么、期望做到多好，还有自信、信念、耐力，你能想到的一切。相比之下写代码直白得多。我不怀疑写小说同样艰难，甚至更难。
transmit101查看英文原文
I don't know about novels, but finishing a piece of music is a truly arduous task. I've never found another activity which is so deeply challenging: forcing you to confront your own ideas of what you're trying to produce, how good you expect to make it, your own self-confidence and self-belief, stamina, you name it. Coding is pretty straight-forward in comparison. I don't doubt that writing novels is similarly tough (possibly tougher)
前几部作品注定难看，数量上的坚持比单部作品的质量更早起作用。
真正该问的是：为什么作家还在继续写小说。至于放弃，我只能说自己尝试了四五次才“完成”一部，而且最先完成的两部很糟糕；又写到再下一部，才真正有可发表的东西——尽管在找经纪人的波折里，它还躺在我的硬盘上而不是书店里。
jseliger查看英文原文
The real question is why writers keep writing novels, which I engaged here: http://jseliger.com/2010/12/09/why-unpublished-novelists-keep-writing-why-not-an-answer-as-to-why-this-one-does . As for abandoning novels, I can only say that it took me four or five attempts at writing novels before I "finished" one, and even the first two I finished were terrible. It took until the novel after that to actually have something publishable, although adventures in agent land mean that it's still on my hard drive rather than bookstores.
放弃往往不是因为做不出来，而是被新项目分心、或过早判定“这事不会成”。
这种情况在代码上也常见。我 2002、2003 年做过一个网页博客程序，本想干掉 MovableType，有 beta 测试者给了很好的反馈，但我被另一个项目分了心，觉得博客不会那么流行，就这么放弃了，连域名都放过期了。另一件事是我在企业内网工作期间发现了 IE 5.0 的 xmlhttprequest，当时觉得“所有桌面软件都会变成网页应用，我该辞职开公司做网页邮箱、网页文字处理器”，业余时间写了很多原型给老板看，后来觉得它只能在 IE 上跑、当时社区又都看不起 IE，就没了下文。
nikcub查看英文原文
This also happens a lot with code as well. I am sure each person here has at least a few abandoned software projects that they either couldn't finish, didn't want to finish, or at some point later regret not finishing. I would like to hear those stories, it would be interesting. One of mine is I built a web based blogging application in 2002/03 which was supposed to kick MovableType's ass. I had beta testers with great product feedback, but just simply got distracted with another project, thought blogging would never be that popular, and just abandoned it. I even let the domains expire (one of the hosting domains was bloguser.com). I wrote a lot of code for that project, including Javascript in the text editor so you could select and make text bold etc. The other was discovering the original IE 5.0 xmlhttprequest while working on a corporate intranet role (this was in 99-00 IIRC). I remember thinking 'this is awesome, literally every desktop app is going to be written as a web app, I should totally quit my job and setup a company to do web email, web word processor, etc. with fancy javascript'. I spent a lot of hobby time playing with it, writing prototype code, showing my old boss, etc. but then thought it wouldn't get far because it only worked on IE - and at the time most of the web community frowned on IE and I wanted to be one of the cool kids.
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