The Place For My Writers Notes

Original posting 9 August 2009

This is not likely to be terribly organized. Some of Anthony's recent postings got me to thinking about outlining and discovery writing, or plotting and panting -- er, make that writing by the seat of your pants.

One thing I realized is that many of the little tech pieces I've done, and quite a few of the books and articles, are from the outlining or plotting side of the field. Aside from books like Writing the Natural Way, most people seem to focus on structured approaches. Then I got to thinking about it and realized that it is a lot easier to discuss or summarize plotting approaches. Describing outlining is reasonably straightforward, because the outlines or character sheets or plot frameworks are explicit external things that you can point to.

Trying to help people do discovery writing... it's a little bit like helping someone ride a bike? You can do a little bit, but most of it they have to do themselves.

The important question is what helps you to organize your writing. If filling out the "standard" forms and sheets, planning the story in a somewhat abstract form, before you start writing words makes it easier for you, do it. If you prefer to improvise, try this, try that, and then shape things, do that. Or maybe some mixture works for you? There are many people who combine approaches, laying out a plan and improvising. Or improvising a little, planning a little, and mixing things up that way. Whatever works for you, for this story.

http://madgeniusclub.blogspot.com/2009/08/care-and-feeding-of-plots.html

The interesting thing about this blog posting for me was the suggestion that plots are some sort of saturation or crystallization phenomenon. Immerse yourself in a bath of stimulation, reading this and that, going to the museum, listening to people talk -- and at some point, crystals of plot start forming. I think this is more of a discovery writer approach to putting together a story, with a strong dash of random stimulation and neural connections spicing.

Or perhaps take a look at the idea net. This is from How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card. But I think storytellers in any genre use the idea net. As Card points out, it's really four questions: "Why?" "How?" and "What results?" Now before you tell me that that's really only three, why gets asked two different ways. Why in the chain of actions sense simply asks what action led to this action -- and you can keep backing up along the chain. Why in the sense of intention or purpose asks what the intended result of this action was. What's the motivation? Two very different questions, even though they both look like "Why?" How is much simpler, what's the procedure, technology, Rube Goldberg device -- the policeman's method. And what results -- what happens next? Both intended and unintended results, and those unintended spinoffs are sometimes the most interesting ones.

Anyway, as we're doing discovery writing, questions like this can be helpful in thinking it through. You've just written the character into an alley, where he picks up a stone and breaks a window in a car. Why? You know the events that led up to this, but why would our hero decide to break a window in a car? What's he thinking about? How in this case is pretty simple. Although it might be worth thinking about why he didn't use the gun in his shoulder holster? And then there's the what results question. What happens when you break a window in a car? Most modern cars, the burglar alarm goes off. Which means people are going to be looking. So when the bad guys come racing around the corner, the hero now has an audience.

I'm going to try to remember to include some ramblings about discovery writing when I'm doing the various tech pieces and such. I'm pretty sure I'll forget, so remind me. But it seems to me that taking a look at how to write from those two stances is worthwhile. Sure, outlining and character sheets and all of that are perhaps easier to describe and provide the obsessive compulsive among us with security, but... there are also times to write boldly into the darkness, to let the words take you where they will.

Original posting 19 November 2007

Quoting Ben:

[clip]
> How does one handle the enormous word counts?
[snip]

Hi, Ben.

I've been thinking about that question of how to handle lots of words.

I kind of think the real answer might be like the one about how to eat an elephant - one bite at a time. So then the question is how do you divvy up the pile?

There's some different answers to that one, and like Kipling's ways to sing the tribal lays, they are all right. So look for what works for you. Plenty of people find a deadline, a quota, a goal of some kind works for them. Show them the goal and stand back, because they're off and running. That's more or less what the nanowrimo challenge does unless you add a bit to it.

There are also plenty of people who are more regular nibblers. They may not be too comfortable with a huge overhanging goal, but ask them to do a short story every week, an exercise on Fridays, or some other regular task, and they'll get it out week after week without missing. Set up a blog or website to collect that stuff and before you know it, they've got a respectable pile of stuff.

Sometimes you can take one of these and translate it into the other. That's really why I think it's important to take the 50K in a month and look at it as 12.5K a week or a mere 1,666 words a day. They may be mathematically identical, but in terms of emotional commitment, they are often very different.

Or toss in the weekend breaks or whatever makes it fit your life. Or you may be more comfortable with a number of hours, a list of scenes or topics, or some other way of carving that old elephant into bites that fit your dentures. When I teach project management, I usually point out that one of the most important measures of a work breakdown structure is whether it makes sense to you, and that's really what we're talking about. Take one skewer of grilled meat a day, and that oliphaunt doesn't look nearly as scary!

In fact, I've recently pulled this trick on a student here who is writing a paper. See, he told me that the paper is due on February 7, so there was lots of time. I asked him to make a list of the steps that he needed to go through to have the paper ready. He looked a little puzzled, but fairly quickly had a list of nine or 10 things. And I suggested that we start at the deadline and work our way back. So final review by the companies might take - oh, say two weeks. And this would take a week or so. Oh, let's skip the New Year season, since that's when everyone will disappear. And . . . suddenly we were looking at needing to start last week in order to get the paper done in time (and we don't have slack in that schedule yet - I think we're going to be in trouble). Anyway, having those intermediate little inch-pebbles helps quite a few of us keep on track.

There's also a group of folks who do a fine job of planning, Might be note cards, character sheets, or one of the design-a-story programs, but they work through their outline/design in some detail first then get into filling out the structure they have drawn up.

I've recently seen Lois McMaster Bujold describing her approach. She says she keeps an outline from the beginning but it is very sketchy, and as she writes, she also fills in the outline and modifies it. She said she probably has as many words in the final outline as in the novel.

Incidentally, I think an important piece is learning how to change up. For example, I am way too likely to get stuck in the research part of articles I am writing - I love digging through the literature and doing little summary papers. I really have to cut myself off and go back to writing the paper, putting together a structure, filling it in, and then smoothing out the whole thing. I have trouble cutting out the extra neat stuff that is really irrelevant, too. Non sequitur is my Achilles heel. I have learned, to some extent, the usefulness of changing formats. Written text, power point slides, and for real brainstorming, I like a big white board. Shifting back and forth when working can help you see the big picture and all those little details, too.

(I also keep side notes, both on paper and in files, of those extra ideas and stuff. Somehow jotting those down gives me the freedom to set them aside for now, instead of having them chew up my attention. And sometimes I even remember later to look at them. Good fodder for quick little followup pieces!)

I guess what I'm saying is to start with an approach that feels comfortable for you, whether that's free writing or carefully laid out writing, but don't be afraid to shift gears as you go along. Maybe you find yourself a bit off track and need to do some surveying and map work before the next step, or maybe you hit an inspiration and want to take off and write while the words are flowing - do it!

Sorry, this isn't a nicely bundled short answer. I'm not sure there is a short answer. Maybe find a hint over in that song about "life's a dance that you learn as you go, as" and writing, the reflection of life in an inky pool, well,
it takes a dash of that spirit too?

Hope something in here helps.