It occurs to me that in all the floundering and flopping around I’ve done, trying to explain my process, I haven’t really explained how I proceed from zero, to get to a finished draft. In other words, I haven’t described my actual process, only the background. Just to keep things honest, let’s start from bargain-basement nothin’.
To start, I don’t generally write to commission – in other words, I only write what I think up. An idea can start from anything: a photo, a song lyric, something someone says in conversation, a random quote. And sometimes it can literally drop on me out of a clear blue sky. Ideas are cheap. Ideas are everywhere – I covered this before. Now, we get to work.
If the idea sticks with me, it either goes into its own file, or into a general catch-all file I keep on my computer. For strong ideas, I can actually remember them (in my head, yes) for quite some time. I will revisit these ideas from time to time to see if anything new branches off and starts to grow. In most cases, I will get a few little off shoots, but they run out of steam quickly and I leave them in the file.
Some ideas catch fire and start to write themselves in my head. Whole sections of description or pages of dialog will run rampant through my imagination, and I’ll have to write it down quickly. I will usually get several pages of written treatment down before I’m interrupted by work or dinner or just life in general. If I can get back to those fast enough, and I’m not working on anything else at the moment, I can go quite a way before hitting a snag. In the case of a short story, I may get the whole thing written (or a great deal of it, anyway) before any serious problems occur. Usually, I need to get back to a half-formed script within seven days or it starts to go septic.
In the case of long form stuff, I have to be careful not to get too deep into it if I’m working on a different script. Working on two (or more) projects at once only works for me if only one of them is long form. Even then, it’s not easy to do. It’s not that I can’t keep two or more ideas in my head at once (I do that all the time), but when I have a half dozen characters and their motivations and the external action for each story all running at once in my head – I can start to trip over stuff. This is not conducive to good storytelling.
Now the topic everyone loves to hate – stalling out in the middle of a story. As I’ve explained before, I don’t get ‘writers block’ in the conventional sense. I don’t feel that sense of standing on the edge of a yawning crevasse, I don’t slide into depression (at least for that reason), and I don’t go on a three-day drunk. I may wander around, confused for a few days, but I can usually find where I went wrong in the story and fix the issue. Yes, the story will sometimes sit in my head, refusing to be written until I get my bearings. It’s maddening and it makes me grouchy, but I know I can recover. The seven-day rule holds here, as well.
I am a dedicated ‘pantser’, meaning I write by the seat of my pants, discovering where the story wants to go as I follow gleefully along behind it. When I get stuck, I will sometimes resort to a bit of plotting or even (horrors!) outlining. It does work – sometimes. Usually, it works long enough to get me going again, and then I forget about the outline. I will also, for long form, often start with a rough outline, from which I will usually depart. I guess that makes me a kind of ‘plantser’ (plotter/pantser). Hey, whatever works, right?
Short stories take a minimum of a week to write, sometimes several weeks. A novel takes me months or years to finish. I’m trying to get faster with that, we’ll see what’s possible. I haven’t finished a play yet, so I have no idea how long that takes. Realize too, I’m just talking the first draft of anything. Next comes the edit.
My first edit is usually a quick read-through, correcting spelling and grammar errors, maybe adding a word or two. If it feels tight enough, I have someone else read it. I use Words Matter Communications (https://wordsmattercommunications.com) – they’re impartial, quick and make great recommendations. I get my stuff back quickly and move on to the next edit – story sense.
This is the tough edit for me. I have to read through my own work as if it were someone else’s and I have to fix it. This is tough to do if I don’t have enough distance on the script yet. In this edit, I’m looking for everything at once: broken connections in the narrative, clunky dialog, bits of information without background, poorly constructed scenes – the works. During this edit for Soul Surgery, I added almost 5000 words to the script. I rarely delete stuff unless it’s just not working. My writing is sparse enough that I have to add words to make things work, usually.
So, what about the ideas that just sit in the files, never leaping to flame? I have to say, so far that’s been a very small percentage of the total number of stories. But if it comes right down to it, not every idea is going to live, just like not every plant, puppy or person bears fruit. It’s sad, but there’s not much I can do about it. I have too many ideas in my head now, and they all want to make it to print. I can only do my best.
So, did I finally get enough information about my process down?
Be well.
bcd