Finding Your Process
A captive English class of twenty-five kids is
not the ideal way to learn to write. Not everyone learns the same
skills in the same way in the same order or at the same rate, but
that's what those classes demand. I'll bet that many people still
try to write as they were taught in school. If it doesn't work or
they hate writing, they suspect that they themselves are to blame,
but the problem may be that they bought the myth of The One Right
Way.
Does your writing process really fit you? Take a
few days and a few chances to see if there's a better way out
there.
Grad school rekindled my long submerged urge to
write. Over the next nine years, I wrote five unpublished novels,
one of which became my sixth-year thesis. The others were terrible
and I knew it, but they helped me learn how I actually write.
The thesis, my fourth novel, was the first time
I'd used an outline. Now, I always use one even though I know it
will change many times before I complete the first draft. It helps
me.
Do you outline just because your teacher told you
to do it in school? If you do, have you found a more flexible method
than Roman numerals and capital letters? If you do some kind of pre-
writing, is it words, diagrams, phrases, or something else? What
really works best for you?
Do you write at a particular time of day because
you need to get to work or the kids have to be in school? If not,
try earlier or later. Try in a different room. Walk around outside
before you write, or go to the gym, or jog first to get your brain
working.
If you like outlines, write a scene or two with
no preparation and see what happens.
Try doing character bios for your main characters
before telling the story. It may drive you crazy at first, but take
some time and figure out how your character will change. Figure out
what's at stake, or what that character's weakness is.
Try writing in pencil or roller ball or ballpoint
or fountain pen or even crayon instead of at the keyboard. I do my
preliminary character and scene planning on wide-ruled notebook
paper so I can spread pages all over the floor and see how they
look. And I draw lots of arrows and lines to different pages. If you
already write in pencil or pen, try composing at the keyboard.
Do you write a few pages then go back and revise
them before going on? Try writing the whole work before you go back.
If you usually avoid revising until the very end, do it in
sections.
Do you have a word or page goal for the day? What
happens if you change it to more or fewer? What happens if you say
you will write a SCENE a day instead? If one scene is four pages and
another is ten, can you still do it?
I always write a complete scene by the end of the
day because I need to find the rhythm, and it won't sustain
overnight. Who cares if it's awful? Once it exists, I can fix it
later.
That's a major difference between "school"
writing and "real" writing. Standardized tests promote the myth of
the Perfect First Draft. Some pieces need three drafts, some need
ten, and some need even more. It depends on the writer and the
piece, but you always have to revise.
I won't start writing a novel until I have at
least fifty scenes in what I think is the correct order. I know who
the POV character is (I tend to use close third POV), the basic
event and how the situation or character changes in each scene. Then
I save every scene as a separate word document. That's so I can
change the order later if I want to. Scene 7-A may become 12-B.
Later, I may make it Scene 47-G or cut it completely.
The character and plot preparation usually takes
me about three months. That's how I learn where I need to do
research, which I try to avoid unless it involves interviewing
people.
After that preparation, I write the first draft
in six to eight weeks, one scene a day. I don't worry about anything
except getting from beginning to end. I find the rhythm and where
scenes need to move or go away or where I left something out. As I
find the rhythm, I may complete two or even three scenes a day, and
may write the last scenes in one huge outburst.
The second draft adds description and more
texture. By about the fifth draft, I've found most of the
character's voices for dialogue and the scenes in their point of
view.
I don't print anything out until the sixth or
seventh draft because it takes me that long to get the ideas in the
right order and find most of the details. Then I cut, add, move, and
eventually correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
Once I've printed out the scene, I read EVERY
WORD aloud while walking around the room. That's when I hear all the
repetitions and awkward sentences. I fix those. Then I put
everything together into one document for the first time so I can
write the transitions.
One last question:
Do you write EVERYTHING (novels, blogs, essays,
short stories, poems, memoirs, etc.) with the same tools and in the
same way? Why? Do you write some things more easily than others?
Could you use that technique on other kinds of writing?
Right now, I work as hard writing a short story
as I do completing the first draft of a novel. I'm still looking for
a better way to do it.
I know there is one.
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