“A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.” — Raymond Chandler
I participated in National Novel Writing Month again this year, so I’ve been thinking about my current writing process and how I came about it after studying how other authors write.
Outlining
Some authors are “planners” and like to outline and plot everything out in advance, while some authors are “pantsers” or "discovery writers” and just see where the story takes them as they put the words down. Crime writer Jeffrey Deaver is a planner.
“For every book and story I write, I spend over half the time outlining — before I write a single word of prose.”
“I advocate outlining for a number of reasons. Among them: It helps you achieve the necessary story structure if you write, as I do, fast paced, plot driven fiction. Outlining first is also a far more efficient way to write. By wrestling the plot into shape using Post-It notes, or bullet points on your computer, you will see what works and what doesn’t, before diving into the prose. You won’t need to go back and revise dozens, perhaps hundreds, of pages when you come up with a new plot idea later in your work.” — from "Jeffrey Deaver: On the Benefits of Outlining," Writer’s Digest
Discovery Writing
Recently retired thriller writer Lee Child of Jack Reacher fame has the opposite take. When asked if he dedicated a lot of time to planning his plot before writing, he had this so say:
“No, I never plan anything. I want the same excitement I would get as a reader. I don’t want to know what happens. If I plotted it all out and planned it, I would have told myself the whole story already and be ready to move on. There would be much less excitement for me in the writing process and the plot would come out as flat and wooden to the reader.” — Lee Child from "Q&A With Top Thriller Writer Lee Child" on NewWriting.net.
I think of Ray Bradbury as the ultimate discovery writer.
“...in my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head. I would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an assortment of characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later, to my amazement, a new story would be finished and done. The surprise was total and lovely. I soon found that I would have to work this way for the rest of my life.” — Ray Bradbury from Zen in the Art of Writing (1990)
Visualizing Away from the Keyboard
For the story I worked on this month I did some prep before I started writing. I made a list of characters and their motivations, made worldbuilding notes, and wrote down the scene ideas I had. The scene ideas became a loose outline. As I started writing the story I thought of new scenes and added them to the list. This allowed me to stay on track while at the same time stay motivated. The outline was loose enough to where I was discovering new plot points and things about my characters as I was writing.
But there was something else I was also doing: For some scenes and characters I spent a lot of time thinking of what was going to happen before actually writing anything down. It turns out that this is exactly how author J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5 fame works. He recently explained his process on Twitter.
“To swing back around to my process...I can't think of much that's worse than staring at a screen trying to figure out what to write next. Total performance anxiety. And then once you *do* write the scene, it's kind of concretized in that moment, and there's the inertial tendency to leave it as is rather than just rewrite a wounded scene end-to-end.
So what I do is to visualize the scene *away* from the keyboard, down to the smallest detail, end to end, over and over until it's solid. There isn't the intimidation factor of the waiting screen, or the sense that I have to stay with what I wrote just because I already wrote it.
While it's just in my head, it's infinitely malleable, I can turn it upside down, inside out, reverse the structure, it's like a kid playing with letter-blocks. I will do this five, ten, twenty times, however many is required until it finally feels real and authentic.
It's only then, when I can see and put to memory every single line in my head that I finally go to the keyboard and at that point I'm not actually writing, I'm just typing what I've already seen happen. This minimizes stress, maximizes play, and then I can write as fast as I can type.” — J. Michael Staczynski on Twitter (now rebranded as X), November 3, 2023
I got excited when I read this and thought, "Hey! I’ve been doing some of that!”
My Frankenstein Process
All the authors make good points. When I first tried writing stories, I didn’t plan anything out. But while it was fun, I usually got lost the further I got into a story. So, I started outlining. It kept me from getting lost and overwhelmed, but after finishing a detailed outline I lost the motivation to keep writing the story, just as Lee Child describes above.
Now I plan a little on paper, but not too much. I also spend time thinking over things quite a lot before I begin writing certain scenes. I think of myself as a “plantser," somewhere in between a planner and a pantser. Through trial and error, I've cobbled together a process that works for me so far, and it all reminds me of the Raymond Chandler quote above.
