Hurrah! I finished my first draft for my WIP this week! Sha-boogaloos and happy dances for everyone!
I'm pretty pleased with what's there, too. Fingers crossed, and touch wood for good measure, but I'm hoping the edits will be fairly painless.
The following quotation by E. L. Doctorow sums up what the experience of writing this book has been like:
It's like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.Word. With this novel, it seemed like I was never very sure what was going to happen next. I had a vague idea of what the ending was going to be and what the characters were going to experience--and that was it. I brainstormed every new scene as I came to it.
And it's not that I didn't try to outline the novel in advance--it's just I finally realized I might as well be struggling to write the book instead of struggling to write the outline.
I'm not really a seat-of-the-pants writer. I do need to know what the scene I'm going to write contains before I start typing it up. However, I'm obviously not quite a plotter either. And although I find it anxiety-inducing to not know where a story is going, maybe this isn't such a bad way to do things.
When I write scene by scene, I'm always focused on this moment. I have to concentrate on making the scene pop to life and feel immediate because--Gandalf and Yoda preserve me--it's all I've got. I cannot skip ahead. There is no "ahead". Not yet. Big ol' black hole waiting to eat me, right there.
I think most writers fall somewhere between the extremes of "Seat Of Ma Pants, OMG" and "Full Metal Outline". Where do you fall, and how do you split things up? When do you sit down and brainstorm, and at what point do you just dive in and write? Do you always do things one way, or does it change from project to project? I'd love to hear about your technique.
P.S. - I just finished A Dance With Dragons, and George R. R. Martin is an evil, evil, black-hearted man. Oh, how I love him and his wonderful books!
11 comments:
It should be no surprise I lean towards Full Metal Outline, but it wasn't always like this. In fact, I spend more and more time with the outline in each successive project.
But even at my most improvisational, I would only pants Act 1 or so before realizing that, "Holy heck! I have no idea how to get from here to the end I envisioned!" And to some form of outline I would go.
I do fall in the spectrum with a bit of each. Pre-draft, it's quite a lot of outlining. I need a strong mental foundation for the story, a broad A-Z roadmap that hits all the major points. Especially with scifi/fantasy, I also need a lot of worldbuilding before I can dive into the story. Once I'm writing, though, there's a lot of flexibility within each scene and the characters. A lot changes in the midst of it, but I follow the main path I laid out before.
This was a post I did on the system I use for that initial outline:
http://write-strong.com/?page_id=136
Oh, and super-congrats on the draft!
Congrats on finishing your draft.
TBH i have tried to get into that series of book so many time, and I just can't keep reading it. I don't know what it is but I always put it down and not wanting to read any more.
On the other hand I am loving the TV series.
Adam: Yes, most of my attempts at outlining have followed a moment of thinking, "Oh crud--what next?"
Josh: Thank you, and thanks also for linking to that post!
J. A. Beard: Thank you! I appreciate it.
Sarf: It's a pretty sprawling, involved story, and quite dark, too--the author is quite willing to kill off major characters in gruesome ways.
For me, it's the characters that draw me in. I find them all so very engaging.
I think it makes much more sense to have a good solid outline and then fill it in as you go along.
Only I can't make it work.
Every time my outline gets too complete, I feel like I've told the story and I lose interest.
Still, I'm only doing it as a hobby so it doesn't matter so much as for people who aim to get published.
I use a sort of "incremental outline and improvise" method. Before I write a word of prose, I have to have a one-page outline that shows the story in broad strokes, that gets from the start to the end, and I have to know how the story ends. It's only one page, sometimes it's only twenty sentences long. Once I had nothing but a list of 24 chapter titles and I was able to write a novel from that.
Anyway, I have my one-page outline and then I start writing from start to end and I don't jump around in the story. I have to write chapter 7 before chapter 8 and on to the last page. Usually when I end a chapter I make a list of the events that must happen in the next chapter before I write it. Sometimes I think it's like jazz, where I have the chord changes written out and I improvise the melodies as I go along.
Fairyhedgehog: Maybe Scott's one-page method, detailed below, would help you? I can totally see how outlining something too completely might sap your enthusiasm--I've totally had the experience of planning something only to have my brain decide I'm done now!
Scott: That one-page outline method might work really well for me; thanks for noting it! I'd still brainstorm scenes as I come to them, but it would help reduce my anxiety about where I'm going with it all.
The problem with hardcore pantsing is that you generate lots of material you'll later cut, and if you're a also reader alouder this can be hard to do once lines and passages have become fixed in your head like quotations.
So I try to pants at the outline stage, when it doesn't matter what form the writing takes. Why, you can even write 'knob' in the margin.
Once I've got something fairly concrete, I write it out, on the understanding that 'concrete' is not synonymous with 'fixed'.
In that sense, my bona fide writing stage is a little like telling someone about a TV show I've seen.
Like the episode of Dr Who when Smith and Gillan meet the pirates.
Having watched the episode 3 or 4 times, I can retell the story — afresh each time. I have the basic structure around which I can improvise and, in the spirit of oral storytelling, no retelling will be the same twice.
Pantsing as u go, as I understand it, would be like writing out the pirate story as you're watching it — potentially exciting in terms of being swept up by the uncertainty and mystery of it all but with the risk that you might wander off at a tangent and make more of what's unimportant (and less of what is) than necessary.
So I'm for pantsing at the mutable stage when there's no need to write anything down. Then follows the underwearing as I toy with the gaps in my pants-propelled outline.
But try telling that to a nun.
Whirlochre: Nuns just don't understand the writing process.
I like how you describe this method; it reminds me of what I've read about the method of some stage actors. The lines they speak every night are the same, but they strive to make each performance slightly different--not enough to foul up their fellow actors, but enough to make every evening's show feel fresh to both them and the audience.
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