Writing Process Redux

I'd planned to write about grammar this afternoon, but my head hurts, and so I really don't want to write about grammar. I will finish the academic commentary soon, prolly early next week.

One post that has almost slipped through the cracks is my commentary on the classic planner/pantser debate. I am discovering that I am...neither! And neither are you, I'd warrant. When people talk about this, what I believe they are talking about is their initial discovery writing. My initial discovery writing is generally writing something. Sometimes it's crap, sometimes it's usable. Ah hah! You say with smug superiority. That makes you a pantser.

No. It makes me someone who uses that method to discover my writing sometimes. I'll write so far that way, then make a tentative outline, explore those ideas until I deviate, write some more usable and/or crappy writing, and then...look it over and outline it some more. We do a variant on this until we end up with our first crappy draft, written with both pantser and plotter strategies.

I don't think this approach is that unusual. I think that what's going on is pre-writing. Sometimes it's more structural, and other times it's more free. I think it's sort of silly to classify writing process merely by the discovery of your material. Because it's the revision that gets to the root of your book.

Once I have that initial morass of crap (and some usable stuff on the page), I switch over to a more critical mode. Since I've become a Maassketeer, I realize that what I used to call deep writing is that examination of the tension in the book, and what I can do to ramp up the drama and suspense. It's at this point that I think most writers become plotters and planners. Yes, interesting discoveries, unbidden from the subconscious can come at any time in the process, but eventually I have to wrangle that novel into a structure, an organized group of tension-building scenes.

I guess what I'm saying is that a lot of the question of how a novel is created is often kept in the shallows of our creative processes. I think that we look at how we produce that first wonderful, endorphine-filled draft that is the fun part of writing. The deeply satisfying work of revising calls for writers to use their other skills, and I suppose that we all have tools in our tool kit to go the distance and finish the book.

Focus not on how the information gets on the page. Focus on what you do with it to improve it once it's there. I guess.

Still putting on my pants, one leg at a time.

Catherine

Mirrored from Writer Tamago.