How To Write A Novel

[truepenny]

Oh fine. If ALL the cool kids are going to do it.

---

The first thing I must confess is that I have never written a novel the same way twice.

The second thing is that I don't do ANY of it the same way Justine or Jay or Bear does. (Well, except maybe for the whining to friends part.)

Insofar as it can be said I have a broadly applicable method, it's summed up in the E. L. Doctorow quote: It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

However, comma, everything having the defects of its virtues, this means that my second draft tends to be a radical reworking of my first draft and my third draft ditto for my second. Because in the first draft, I'm following my headlights, but in later drafts, it's like I'm trying to give directions to someone whose headlights have gone out. So, you know, the place where I fell into a pot-hole the size of Manhattan, or where I went off the road entirely and drove through the cornfields for a mile and a half ... I have to remap the journey so that the reader will still get to our mutual destination, but they won't have to get lost, cold, soaked to the skin, and twitchy with frustration.

The experience of reading a book is not the same as the experience of writing a book, and we can all count our blessings on that one.

But, process. With bullet points, even.

• something to write on
  
• idea
  
• character
  
• conflict
  
• write
  
• get stuck
  
• complain to friends, spouse, cats, imaginary people on the internet
  
• get unstuck
  
• write
  
• infinite loop until finally
  
• finish draft
  
• foist on give to first readers
  
• get feedback
  
• weep, wail, rage in the streets
  
• revise
  
• revise some more
  
• REVISE, DAMMIT
  
• finish 2nd draft
  
• title
  
• send to editor, agent, other Authority Figure
  
• start fishing around for another idea

You'll notice there are neither spreadsheets nor spreadsheets in this list. I just ... it's like asking a sheep to explain a toaster. My brain doesn't work like that. Which is neither to say that I'm wrong, nor that Justine's wrong, nor that Jay's wrong, nor that Bear's wrong. Just that we all come at it from different places, and my place just doesn't include the concept of spreadsheets as applied to writing.

I also don't worry about plot. Probably, I don't worry about plot nearly as much as I ought to. But, you know. I have characters, and they have conflicts, and that usually takes us far enough that I can see a pattern.

I write on the computer for preference, but sometimes that's not possible for one of any of a variety of reasons (including that today, for reasons of its own, the writerbrain says, Nope). So I have notebooks and pens. I try to make sure notebook and pen go with me everywhere, so that if I have a couple minutes, or if something should suddenly come clear, I can write it down and be able to find it later.

I am terrible at titles. TER-RIB-LE. Unless the story comes pretitled (as, for example, if I'm doing an Artist's Challenge with elisem, the title will mostly be the last thing I come up with, and I just leave it alone until then. I don't need a thing to call a story; I label story files with their protagonists' names (hey, it worked for Charlotte Brontë and Charles Dickens), and that's a sufficiently pointy signifier that the amorphous mass of the signified story will generally follow.

And, no, I don't outline. If I know something that happens later in the story, I will of course write it down (because otherwise I will forget it), and I usually get to a point in a draft where I can make little lists of things in brackets--scenes that need to happen, plot issues that need to be resolved, thematic strands that need to be woven in. I've had it happen a couple of times that I've started a story knowing nothing but the ending. I still have to follow my headlights through the book, though. Working everything out ahead of time has had a tendency to kill the story like a butterfly on a pin, so although I'd do it if it seemed to be genuinely what I needed to do, I am very leery of doing it just 'cause.

I am much more AWARE of plot and structure and Chekhov's gun than I was when I started trying to be a novelist. But my drafting process still seems to involve a great deal of getting things wrong.

The wonderful thing about writing is that it's not performance art, and it doesn't happen in real time. Making mistakes is okay. You can correct them.

And the other thing that this post should make abundantly clear is that my process is not linear. My progress through a story generally is (although the one I'm working on now seems to be perfectly content to let me write out of order, this is very much an aberration), but my process isn't. I write. I try to write every day. I work on whatever seems shiny, or what's got the deadline looming. I am frequently--habitually, even--working on several things concurrently.

And--I emphasize--I don't think my way is either better or worse than Bear's. Or Justine's. Or Jay's. Creativity is subjective, kind of a priori. You do what works. And you look at what works for other people and are delighted and amazed by how different it all is. And if something looks helpful, you borrow it. You make your own engine with the widgets and gizmos you have in your own personal brain. And then you do whatever you have to do to make it run.

Because otherwise, how are you going to get where you're going?

Comments

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

...my second draft tends to be a radical reworking of my first draft and my third draft ditto for my second.

I'm not alone! This makes me feel so much better, with all the talk of spreadsheets and whatnot. The most organized I get is to sit down about 2/3 of the way through the draft and make a list of all the dangling plot bits that need to be wrapped up. ;)

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

You give me hope that I'm not a total freak, Sarah. :)

There are times when I hear other writers talk about how they take stories and chapters apart scene by scene, outline exactly what each ones does and how it advances the story-- and I do start to wonder about my methods. Outlines, spreadsheets; my brain doesn't work that way. At all.

So glad I'm not alone.

[mmarques.livejournal.com]

Your quote - (E. L. Doctorow quote): It’s like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

That's true for me in the physical (but not process) sense! I wrote the 1st two drafts of Mysterious Paris on my PDA+keyboard. I could only see a very little bit physically at a time.

My process, however, was to plan everything ahead of time. And then to keep writing to plan even when I knew it was broken. Because if I didn't keep driving down that rode, I'd get sidetracked and never finish. That's why I was able to write my 2nd draft on the PDA... I just deleted files corresponding to turfed scenes and wrote new scenes.

One day I'd love to give myself more freedom, but I think I need to learn better discipline first (without the crutches).

[larryhammer]

I have characters, and they have conflicts, and that usually takes us far enough that I can see a pattern.

Yes. That. Exactly.

---L.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Should I ever write a novel (which some lonely portion of my brain is beginning to thing might happen) I already know it will not be in linear fashion. Thank ghu for computers and word processors.

But spreadsheets? I love spreadsheets, but they're for *numbers* what the hell are they doing with spreadsheets?

MKK