Deadlines for Books and the Writing Process

We all know the Douglas Adams quote: I love deadlines. I love the wooshing sound they make as they fly past.


Years ago I heard Sean Williams give a talk. He had a contract to write two books in two years. Then his agent called him with another contract to write two books in the same two years. He thought, can't turn it down, so he accepted. That's 4 books in two years (each over 100K). Then he had a call from George Lucas's people who wanted him to write two Star Wars books in two years. Thinking he'd be crazy to turn them down, he accepted. Now that was 6 books in two years. He set himself a goal of X number of words and wrote every day no matter where he was. And he did it.

I asked him, what if he'd gone wrong and had to scrap a couple of chapters and start again. He said, he couldn't go wrong.

Now that's confidence.

I'm bringing this up because I just read this post by Zoe Archer who has four books out this year. When that call comes and the editor says 'I want your book.' They are just as likely to say 'And is it part of a series? We'd like to release them back to back.' As they did with my King Rolen's Kin trilogy.

I love reading and really appreciate it when the whole series comes out at once. But I know for a fact that I'm not a brilliant, first time it's right, kind of writer. I write the book. I think it is finished. I go off and write something else, then I come back to it and discover I can tighten the narrative and delve deeper into the character arcs. (Make those characters suffer!).


As regular readers of this blog know I'm cleaning up The Outcast Chronicles for my publisher. I know I'm improving the books, but they are growing as I add more layers and tweak the narrative. I'm lucky in that I had the books written (in first draft form) when the publishers accepted them. The editor gave me feedback on the synopsis and I've been nose to the keyboard ever since.

Maybe other writers can write their best draft first. Maybe the editor steps in and helps them pull the book together. I like to hand in a book that requires nothing more than a line edit and maybe a 'what did you mean here?' query or two.

I just can't see myself writing 3 100K books from scratch in a year. I might get 2 written, but they would be raw first draft. I'd need another year to polish them (and in the process the 2 books would probably expand into 3 books). That's the thing about NanoWriMo. I like the idea of spending a month doing nothing but writing (banish the husband, six children and the job!), but I don't just sit down to write from Beginning to End.

I sit down and write with a general idea of where the book is going. But at some point I will hit a brick wall and it will be there because I'm trying to make the characters do something they don't want to do, or because something that happened earlier isn't quite right to motivate them to do this scene. So I'll have to go back to where the problem is and re-write. By the time I get to the blockage, I can write through it because the problem is fixed. For me the book is very organic, it just grows. So I end up with a first draft book that is really polished in the first half, then less so as I go on. Time away from a book is really important to help me bring fresh eyes to it.

What is your writing process? What would you do if you had an offer from a publisher who wanted you to hand in three books in twelve months? (After you'd broken out the champagne? LOL)

Keep your process off my emergence

Something people do all the time is classify stuff - we sort everything into some kind of category, from "want" and "not want" to super-complex lists of who knows what, and everything in between, sometimes all at once. The thing about doing that is that when you put something into the box marked "good stuff", it can't also belong in the box marked "bad stuff" - and people are very, very bad at classifying stuff that changes. When does it stop being a puppy and become a dog? There's no clear line, and there are times when it's more puppy-like, and others when it's more dog-like. Basically, classification can't handle the process by which one thing becomes another.

Let's take the nice, simple example. Everyone knows that water freezes at 0C and boils at 100C (substitute the appropriate Fahrenheit numbers if you grew up with the non-metric system). Only, well... it doesn't, exactly. Even at temperatures a fair way below freezing, you get water - and sometimes water at sub-freezing temperatures, if the conditions are right. You've also got a certain amount of water vapor - steam - in the air. There's actually a fairly wide range of temperatures where you can get water in all three states. Or two and a half, depending on whether you regard ice as a solid or as a supercooled liquid.

Then of course the process of phase change between solid to liquid, solid to gas, and liquid to gas isn't exactly simple. It's not like a switch gets flipped and "A-ha!" you've gone from ice to water.

And this is the easy part. We can follow processes and trace them from start to finish, even if we're not sure if a partly melted ice cube is "really" liquid or solid (much less whether that fuzzy monster in the living room is a puppy or a dog). Processes usually have rules, and stick to them.

Emergence is a different beastie again. That's when you get something completely different out of an interaction. Like the way combining a lethally volatile gas (oxygen) with a solid that can be soft and sooty or hard and crystalline (carbon) gets you water/ice/steam. Or how you make that jump from hugely complex aggregates of organic molecules that look kind of like proteins to living things.

Or - to get into the really fun stuff - how the heck self-awareness and a massively complex inner life with an immense storage capacity crams itself into the few pounds of brain matter.

It isn't even that there's a lot to figure out. It's that nobody has an idea how it fits together. There's any number of theories about how you get from a brain to a mind, and nothing to disprove any of them (for the non-scientific readers: technically and ideally, there are no absolutes in science. Only theories that haven't been disproved. Yet). When it comes to something that authors use and exercise everyday, science has no real idea.

Yup. Creativity is one of those pesky emergent phenomenomena (sorry, I kind of like the Nanny Ogg school of spelling). It's there or it isn't, and if you've got it you really do see things differently.

What's more, every creative person sees things differently than every other creative person. Talk about an organizational nightmare, this is it. If you try to classify creative folks, you're going to end up with one box per person. "Sarah-Hoyt-Creativity" and "Dave-Freer-Creativity", and that festering one we hide in the corner is "Kate-Paulk-Creativity", while over to the right there, the box sprouting happy thoughts and flowers is "Rowena-Cory-Daniells-Creativity" (Yeah, yeah, I'm exaggerating. Kind of).

Guess what that does to the marketing folks. It gives them hives. Where do you shelve something that's the literary love child of Pratchett and Dostoyevski? What about "Little Peter Rabbit" meets "Silence of the Lambs" (mint sauce optional)?

For that matter, it makes a heck of a mess of writers, too. Imagine you're buzzing along happily with your satire on life, the universe, and everything (Yes, I like Douglas Adams, too) and out of nowhere - or so it seems - it twists and suddenly the whole thing is much more skating on the thinnest of ice praying it's not going to break. It's interesting, terrifying at times, and usually ends up being better than what you'd originally figured on, if you can survive the transition. Then of course there's that moment when a chance comment or something you see makes everything in your current project click into place so firmly you feel like you've had a chiropractor fiddling about inside your skull.

(And we won't even mention the process of going from "idea" to "book". There be dragons there. Big ones.)

So... the point, if there is one, is that writing is an emergent process all by itself, and spins off a whole bunch of others. What are some of your emergent process stories?

Process Server (an oldie but a goodie) -- by Sarah A. Hoyt

(This week we've been discussing different aspects of the writing process. Since Sarah's off to LibertyCon, along with a lot of other folks, Kate and I thought this post from 2008 fit right in with the week's topics. Enjoy and discuss! -- Amanda)

My friend Dave Freer started this week talking about process and it seems like an excellent lead to follow.

We writers hang a lot meaning and thought on the process. This would seem particularly strange since each of us seems to have a completely different process which he swears by, and different touchstones he believes essential for the work to turn out “right.”

Of course, in actual fact it is not strange at all. After all, like most primitive cultures, we are at the mercy of dimly-understood forces (in this case editorial and distribution) who make decisions we can’t predict with results we often have trouble rationalizing. If fretting and obsessing about process helps calm our anxieties and keeps us from sacrificing goats to the word processor, so much the better – if for no other reason because most of us live in jurisdictions that take exception to animal sacrifice and because animal blood does terrible things to the flooring of your average suburban home.

So – that said – what is my process? Ah.... in what respect?

Each of us, after all, also has a different thing we call process. In fact, while going through workshops, way back in the stone age when I was unpublished (it was hard to be published in the stone age. All that endless chipping away at stone. And a short story could break your back just lugging around) I was often baffled by the phrase “Trust the process” because I was fairly sure I didn’t have one. (Unless bitching, moaning, and coming downstairs to dramatically announce to my husband that I was done with writing forever at least once per story could count as a process.) Part of this was because I knew very few writers with whom I could discuss how writing happened and therefore I tended to assume that what I did to create fiction was not a process but simply how things were done. Like insular people who’ve never been away from their place of birth, I assumed there were two ways of doing things, my way and the profoundly wrong way.

I’ve since met many writers and come across as many “processes” as there are authors. I can rarely tell from the finished product how an author writes (though I can usually tell on “feel” whether they get “character first” or “plot first.” This is not a value judgement. There are excellent authors in each camp.)

Process being such a multi-splendored thing, I could spend hours describing mine, and would probably no more enlighten you – as Dave Freer put it – than observing shark mating habits will improve your sex life. So, for today, I will confine myself to stating some vague, off the cuff commandments on writing in general. (There are ten. I could thunder a little, if it made you feel better. I refuse, however, to engrave stone tablets. Fresh out of chisel.)

Next week I’ll take on the eternal question, which in writing circles passes for chicken vs. egg – Plotter vs. Pantser – and in two weeks, if my attention spa should last that long, we’ll take on matters of speed in writing. This week, however, you’ll have to content yourself with commandments. Feel free to obey them, laugh at them or burn them in ritual sacrifice to your word processor.

1 - Though Shalt Not Put Thy Faith in Magical Objects.

I think we all heard the story, probably apocryphal, of the writer whose writing was brilliant so long as his desk lamp was turned on while he wrote. As proof of the magic in the object, the lightbulb didn’t go out. Ever. He grew more and more confident in his magic lamp with its magic lightbulb. (No, we have no word on whether he rubbed it. Stop being prurient!) Until he and his wife were involved in an acrimonious divorce when the soon-to-be-ex-Mrs.-Writer told him she changed that lightbulb every two weeks or so to make sure it didn’t die while he was writing. Said – possibly non existent – writer allegedly didn’t write again for years.

2 - Thou Shalt Not Put Thy Faith In Anyone’s Opinion of How You Should Work.

No, I really don’t care if the anyone is your best friend, a bestseller who wrote a book on how to do this, or your agent who has a special formula for writing extraordinary books or all of the above rolled into one shining vision of perfection. Look into my eyes, and believe this if you never believe anything else you hear about how to write: chances are someone else is as completely wrong about how you should write as they would be wrong if they told you what your sexual orientation should be or what would work for you in bed. It is not something someone outside your head is qualified to know. I used sexual orientation for a reason. Like how you write it is composed of myriad impulses, pushes, pulls, moral directives and genetic predispositions, most of which operate at a level you will never be conscious of, even if you try to be. Heck, if you think about it the reason WHY we write is just as mysterious. We all know people as sane or insane as we are who feel absolutely no compulsion to serve the fickle divinities of story. Am I saying you shouldn’t listen to other people’s advice? No. I’m saying you shouldn’t put your FAITH in it. By all means, try waking up early and writing for two hours before breakfast just like that bestselling buddy told you to. It might work for you. But don’t bend yourself out of shape trying to make it work for you. You came into the world with a unique set of sensory/expressive tools and ultimately what will work for you will be a combination of parts of what works for other people and things that don’t work for anyone else. (And before you ask, yes, here speaks sad experience. I spent at least ten years changing my writing habits every time someone told me I was doing it wrong. In the end I learned a lot from it, but most of what I learned was the sentence after “2".)

3 - One Man’s Bubblegum is Another Man’s Roast.

Okay, go ahead, say “ew” and get it out of your system. Now moving on from that gross image – what I mean is, never believe someone’s opinion of what your chosen genre/subgenre/approach is and what “true literature” should be. I have read any number of how-to books halfway through, then set them down not to pick them up again because the author – who made good points up to then – suddenly informed me that if I wrote science fiction/horror/mystery/fantasy or simply “commercial” fiction, then he wasn’t talking to me, because what I did was NOT art but formulaic dreck. Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts. “Literature” might be definable and it might be all that (let’s leave aside the fact that it’s rarely defined the same by the author’s generation and the next ones.) I’ve read literary works – few – universally regarded as such that are indeed a cut above most other writing (Jorge Luis Borges comes to mind.) But I’ve read “genre” fiction that evokes the same awe (Terry Pratchett comes to mind) and which certainly required as strong a combination of inspiration and craft. So next time someone tells you “you shouldn’t be writing that drek, write literature instead” look them straight in the eye and tell them to go roast their own bubble gum. The blank look that follows should be enough for a laugh and you can run away before they recover their wits.

4 - Thou Shalt Not Know It All.

Any writer who came up through a writers’ group – a surprising number comes up in isolation, but I came up with a writers’ group who all started at more or less the same level – knows at least one know-it-all. (Actually, they should be so lucky. They probably know five or six.) The know-it-all is the person who doesn’t need my two injunctions above. They would never trust anyone else about their process because their process is perfect, duh. And they would never read a writing book because they know how to write and every one of their words is sacred. The Earth and the Sky shall pass away before they deviate one iota from their writing habits.
After posting the two rules above I needed to post this one. Be aware that most know-it-alls are unpublished and will remain so. The exceptions are geniuses which are as rare among writers as among any other human population. I said not to trust anyone wholesale and not to devalue your work wholesale. However, I did not say to not learn and to remain clasping your ossified little habits to your breast. Writing is a craft. No one would expect to walk into a basket weaving workshop and be a master basket weaver just because he’s used baskets all his life. Expecting to be a perfect writer because you read is just as insane. If you’re starting out, be aware you have to learn techniques for how to do things better. And if you’re experienced, you’ll have to learn techniques for how to do things better. My favorite writers experiment and change until the very end. I’d bet everyone’s favorite writers do.

5 - Practice Makes Perfect

Only writing will help you discover what works for you and what doesn’t. In the abstract loads of things work for me that I cannot in fact do. (Like get up at four in the morning to write. Should work, but I end up typing on the cat, petting the keyboard and trying to pour coffee into my eye.) This is because I don’t write with my rational brain, but with the lint between my toes or something. Meaning, I can’t control it. (For instance, I’ll be in the middle of a novel and another will ambush me in an alley, and I’ll have to stop and outline it before I write anything else. You think I’d choose to do that? But it works.) So write, write a lot.

6 - Do Not Write for the Drawer

Am I saying that everything you write should be publishable? No. I wrote eight novels before one got accepted (three of THOSE have sold since then, but that doesn’t matter.) Am I saying that you should inflict your beginner attempts, full of thumb marks and blotches on professional editors and agents? Forbid the thought. Those people suffer enough as is. What I’m saying, though, is that in your mind you should be aiming to write for publication. What do I mean by this? Well, during a particularly dark year – I think 93, which goes to show you it’s always darkest before dawn, since I started selling shorts in 94 – I “gave up.” Giving up, for me, doesn’t involve actually not writing, since writing is a compulsion. So I decided I was just going to write “for me.” And then I found I couldn’t. Not after the first two weeks or so. If you can, more power to you, and maybe you should just do that, as then you can’t fail. My issue is that in writing only for me I lacked the discipline of trying to get the story to someone outside my head. Sadly, I found the end result of this didn’t do a thing for me either – despite the fact that I am arguably inside my head. (The gentleman at the back should refrain from comments about being out of one’s mind.)

7- Always look up the ladder.

When picking whom to listen to (though never to believe wholesale) about your process/work, always look up the ladder of success to where you’d like to be. In other words, if you are a bestseller stop twisting yourself into pretzels wondering why that reviewer from Middle School Digest hated your last novel. (Of course, if you are a bestseller and reading this, you’re already breaking that rule. Unless you’re doing it for comic relief.) In this, remember success is relative. I have friends who are not as published as I am but whom I acknowledge as experts on plotting or character or even language. I listen to them on that, if not on the rest.

8 - Thou Wilt Remember The Work On Display

The best learning tools are not how-to-write books, but the fiction works themselves. Remember that we know what works. It’s on display on bookstore shelves. Get them. Read them. Analyze them. Besides, you started in this because you like reading, right?

9 - Thou Shalt Seek Out Other Writers.

And if you’re wondering why you should, since you can’t trust them when they tell you what your process should be, see me after class to discuss snark and when not to use it.
Seriously – seek out other writers because as different as we are from each other and as much as we drive each other absolutely nuts (admittedly a short distance and well paved road for most of us) chances are you have more in common with other writers than with non-writers. There are exceptions to this, but by and large when you want to cry into your beer or rejoice in your success, your writer-buddy is more likely to get it than anyone else. Everyone gets “my novel tanked, I’m out of work.” Ditto everyone gets “My novel just went big, I’m rolling in dough.” Monetary failure and success happen in other professions as well. However, the sheer joy of “I finally finished that chapter that hasn’t moved for a week” can only be grasped by a fellow sufferer. Through thick, thin, hell and high water, it is your writer friends who will hold you together.

10 - Write. Submit. Repeat.

Diary of Character Growth

Last week I posted about the story seed I'd been infested with. This week's post is kind of a diary of the things that have emerged since then - mostly character, which is usually the first or second thing I 'get', although there are likely to be other bits of world building and assorted strangeness as well. What I end up with on plot at this stage is usually a starting scenario and what the basic plot and main subplot are likely to be about.

Thursday: Characters begin to emerge. Two of them, one male, one female. Definite sense of a romance subplot. He insists his name is Alvar Seraph, which is... somewhat ridiculous. Arguments over the name begin. She is Millie - possibly short for Amelia or Millicent, although she's being rather close about that.

He's noble and might be willing to accept "Alvar" as a noble title rather than his actual name. It's got to be there, though. Yes, it's weird, but characters will not cooperate for me if I don't have their names right. Long white-blond hair, dark blue eyes - the kind that look like they could be black until you get close - carries a sword-cane. Early twenties, but has had responsibility for a whole lot of things since 14 or 15. His manner isn't so much arrogance as assurance: yes, he really is that good.

She's a street brat. Mama was a whore, and died of her pimp getting pissy. She figures begging, picking pockets and running whatever errands she can get paid for - and pretending to be a boy - is safer.

Okay, so we've got a massive social differential here. Fine. Possibly a Pygmalion aspect.
There's some bioengineering way back - probably from Earth for the spaceship crew, although no-one in story-now knows anything about it. They see an inheritable gift which allows the person who has it to feel the workings and effectiveness of machinery. They 'know' when everything is going well, when something needs maintenance, and when something is going to break. They need training to be able to consciously focus on the gift, and to actually do something about what they feel. They're in two classes: Mechanics can diagnose and fix when told what to do. Engineers can do all that as well as design new machines. Both groups are highly regarded.

He is - of course - an Engineer as well as a nobleman. She has the gift but was never talent-scouted even though the Imperial Academy of Mechanics and Engineering is supposed to find everyone with the gift and train them up: well-maintained machinery is essential to their survival, especially the dampers that keep volcanos from developing in the middle of the cities and the steam turbines that provide power to the cities - powered by diverting water into the volcanic regions to generate said steam.

Opening involves her sensing before he does that a set of dampers under a busy square is about to go, realizing he's got the gift and is more likely to get people out of the way than she is. She'd run away after that, only he's not letting anyone that talented get away from the Academy. The dampers go, but his orders prevent any deaths when a rift opens up across the middle of the square.

He drags her to the Academy - thinking she's the boy she looks like - and goes to arrange a team of Engineers to upgrade the dampers.

Friday: Okay, I was wrong. Milord Alvar is definitely an arrogant sod. Millie is an imp. Sarcastic, self-assured the way street-brats can be (think Gavroche from Les Mis the musical). She's going to cause chaos in the Academy, especially since the Dean of Admissions is one of those unsackable incompetents who gets shuffled to where he can do least damage. Said Dean has problems with well-born girls having the gift, thinks that low class boys who've got it must have got it from a noble ancestor somewhere, and can't possibly learn to be Engineers, and as for low class girls, well they must only be after one thing.

The Academy Arch-Chancellor is one of your ineffectual avuncular types, and really hasn't got a clue how to run things. He's there because he was the most senior staff member when the previous Arch-Chancellor died. Negotiating Imperial political appointments and talented students from the full social range is beyond him. He'd much rather be buried in designs for new mecs.

Social structure/culture is probably most like the British Empire towards the late 1800s, although the colonies have rather more representation than they ever did in the Brit Empire. At this point I think the story is entirely within the capital city (I don't have a name for that yet), but there is a much larger world out there. The Nightside barbarians are a constant threat to the outlying colonies. I'm not sure what/who they are yet, except that it's rather more than just 'barbarians'. I know that at least some of them are exiles and descendants of exiles.

And the little light-bulb just went on to inform me that Milord Alvar and Millie are going to be exiled by the end of this - hence book 2, Nightside.

Weekend: Conflating all of the weekend's news into one piece...

Milord Alvar is still being unfriendly about his name. Millie is a brat. She managed to give all the stick-in-the-mud types collective conniptions in very short order and ends up being taught by Milord Alvar who is amused by her antics rather than horrified - I'm not sure why he finds her amusing, but I imagine I'll find out eventually.

The ending of book 1 involves the Crown Prince, who is the grandson of the Emperor and a nasty piece of work. I'm not sure yet what he's into/up to, but at minimum there's slavery (which is supposedly outlawed) and attempting to arrange granddaddy's murder so he can have the throne. I'm not sure why he ends up crossing swords with Milord Alvar and Millie, but he does, and he dies in a spectacularly ugly fashion - which is why they end up more or less exiled (as in, they're not sure they'd get a fair trial and decide that discretion is the better part of survival).

Monday: His Imperial Majesty is getting to the end of a long life, and outlived all his children. He's still mentally with it, enough that he's got his heir tied up in layers of bureaucracy and is quietly looking for a way junior can have an unfortunate accident. That's not a problem. The problem is that it's kind of difficult to classify "sword cut from navel to chin" as an accident - which means he has to try and convict the culprit.

Tuesday: Well, well. Milord Alvar is in the line of inheritance - distantly, but close enough that if His Imperial Majesty chooses to select an heir rather than appoint his closest male descendant his heir, Milord Alvar is in the running. I think His Majesty hopes that after a suitable absence he can blame junior's death on someone who's already going to die - or already dead - and appoint Alvar his heir. It's not an option that gets used a lot because it causes civil wars: imperial princes tend to get a little upset when they're passed over for the distant cousin they never thought was worth considering.

Wednesday: Weird synchronicity. In the MMORPG I play for decompression I just got to the final world. The 'feel' of it is exactly the feel for this piece - advanced civilization corrupted and dying/dead. Oh, and parts of the cities crumbling into lava. No dragons, though, more's the pity.

Attack of the World Building Bunnies

(Or: A diversion on writing process)

So there I am, sleeping peacefully - or as close to it as this narcoleptic gets (kind of a drugged doze, usually) - and I get ambushed. This happens with disturbing frequency.

I know you're not supposed to admit you get ideas from dreams, but I do, often. What I don't get are plots, which means after the idea makes its appearance there's an incubation period of indeterminate length while the idea ferments and characters start lurking behind odd corners of grey matter waiting for their chance to ambush me. Occasionally they'll insist I tell their story without letting me know what the end is, but usually I have to pry it out of them. There are times when I wish for a crowbar, then I remember they live inside my skull, and the result of me applying a crowbar to that wouldn't be all that scenic.

Anyway. So I wake up with this haunting image and a data dump about this world and setting. It's SF mixed with steampunk, an accidental colony on a world that's a) orbiting a huge star close enough that the thing positively looms in the sky, b) has a moon that's also huge (it may actually be effectively a binary planetary system, but that's not entirely relevant) and in geostationary lock, c) has a ridiculously long rotation period, d) has an even more ridiculously long planetary year (as opposed to what the locals call a year), and e) the entire civilization has grown up from its origins during a solar eclipse. Oh, and the world is very volcanic. They use this as a power source, and live in perpetual twilight.

The image is glimmerings of a dark orange sun around the edges of shadow against the silhouette of Victorian-esque buildings. It comes with a sense that the whole place is doomed - Nightside is largely unexplored, cold, and people who explore there don't come back. It's relatively warm with the eclipse: full sunlight will be too hot for fragile humanity. And vulcanism is tearing the land apart.

All of this is quietly simmering somewhere in the back of my head, accumulating depth and history and waiting for the right character to emerge and to carry a story which I suspect will involve an apparently doomed battle to survive the combination of an increasingly hostile physical environment and a decadent cultural environment. And just to prove that the way I build stories is... interesting, I now have the titles of at least two books in this world: Twilight, and Nightside. It's going to be dark. I suspect 'lyrical' may creep in just from the feel of the place in my mind.

Yes, this is what passes for my process at the very beginnings. Whether this one goes anywhere will depend on whether a character emerges to carry the piece. It's a rather complex synergy for me, requiring any number of pieces to land in place. If/when they do, I have a story which will devour what I laughingly refer to as my spare time. Until then, I have an annoying itch in the back of my head and some odd mental imagery.

To those of our readers who write, how do your stories start? What is your 'seed' and how does it grow? To everyone - do you want to hear more of the progress of this particular seed as it happens? If so, are there any special requests? I can't make any guarantees - at this stage it's quite possible the whole thing will die - but I'll do my best to oblige.

Process and the Writer

Like pretty much anyone who works in just about any kind of paid job, I get a lot of stuff about process, methodology, and of course "best practices". At the same time, the posts here illustrate that for a writer, these concepts just flat don't apply. It's not that hard to understand: writing lives very firmly with the arts, and each piece a writer does is unique. The only place for process, methodology and best practices is with the middlemen who do the job of turning that work of art into a whole lot of identical widgets (i.e. books) by the magic of file copy and possibly the printing press.

Or is it?

Fiction tends to fit one of a very small number of templates (depending on who you ask, anything from three to twenty), so there's a structure. Writers tend to fall into three broad camps - the plotters, the pantsers, and the plantsers. Each camp has similarities in how they work, and there are also similarities across the whole field: the general dictum that you have to plant butt in chair and write, the notion of setting targets for wordage, be they "something" or "five thousand words" or anywhere in between. (Would someone please pick up the fellow in the back? I think he fainted.) Writing routines are popular, too.

So is there a set of writing processes and practices that can help?

Actually, there's probably several per writer - because while they can fit into some broad categories, they're still going to change around a lot with each project. Or maybe not. Take two of mine (Please. I'll say really nice things about you if you give me lots of money for them). Impaler had plot and structure on it imposed by the history I was working with. The piece I'm working on at the moment, Wether Fakawi Blues, is completely different in tone, structure and may be different enough to need a different name on the cover.

Both of them started with minimal outlining: I had about three to four pages for Impaler, and for Fakawi I had a previous piece (unsold) that's getting ripped off and mostly recast, so the basic plot is more or less the same but a lot of the motivations, minor characters and so forth are changing around, and the final sequence is going to be nothing like the original. Both of them got "research on the fly" - which for Impaler was a heck of a lot more intense as I broke off what I was writing to go digging through my biographies of Vlad Draculea, Googling for old maps of eastern Europe and Turkey, and so forth - and both got written in the gaps between the rest of my life when I had a bit of brain to spare.

And both, as I got closer to any given scene, would get talked over with my first readers. I torment them with snippets, email them chapters as they're done (Yes, they get to suffer through my raw, unedited first drafts. You see why I value them?), and discuss the next scene or next chapter with them. And that is my process, such as it is. It works for me. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone else.

What are your writing processes? Is there a common thread to how you work through a book and get your plots sorted out, or does each book impose its own patterns on you?

Processing

*Guys, sorry to be so late. Something was trying to land on me yesterday and by the time I went to bed I'd forgotten what time it was. By the time I woke up I was two and a half hours late. SORRY.*


Everyone has a different process, of course. I know saying that seems like a given, but strangely, it’s not. I spent at least the first ten years of my career trying to fit the process of whichever advice book I’d just read or whoever had just spoken to our writers’ group. Considering how many people who write these books or give lectures talk about “the one true way” the idea of “more than one process” is probably more arcane than I thought.

But it gets worse than that because at least for me – how it is for you guys out there? – each book has its own process. Yeah, it might be close to the last one. At least I usually try the same “point of attack” because it usually works for me. But there’s the occasional book that just won’t “talk to me” and will keep me trying new things till it unlocks.

My older son, who is quite smart – smarter than I at any rate – is now writing his second novel. It took him almost two years to actually get going on it. Why? Because he couldn’t figure out what was happening in it. And he couldn’t “just write” till he figured out what the plot was because if he did that “everything will be trash. I’m not a pantser, I’m a plotter.”

I kept telling him “Some novels don’t tell you till you’re halfway through” (meaning of course, your subconscious doesn’t allow you to unlock whatever it’s come up with till you’re halfway through. I’m not under the illusion novels TALK) and “Just start it and find out.”

Of course he refused to for two years, which is why he’s only now doing it and finally figuring out what the novel is all about, etc.

With short stories my “process” is more consistent. Originally – though I never fit the “know everything about it before you put a word on paper” – I started with a short story outline. It went something like this (if I find the original, I’ll post it.)

POV Character:

Problem:

Setting:

Reason POV Character can’t obtain goal easily:

First attempt:

Block:

Second attempt:

Block:

Internal realization/mirror moment/story goal flip:

Third attempt:

Block/climax/resolution:

Epilogue:

Having this skeletal sort of outline allowed me to write the short story very quickly. The first time I found out there was an issue with it was when I got halfway through a story (Traveling, Traveling, sold to Analog) and realized it was complete. At that moment, I started suspecting my process was out of kilter. I think I still outlined a couple more, but after that, I found I had the entire short story completely in my head. No need to outline.

Does this happen to novels? Sometimes. That’s more insane because then I need to write very fast, before I forget all the twists and heaven helps me if I have to take a break because of an emergency.

So, how do you do it? Do you try to fit someone else’s process? Do you have your own? Does it change? Have you created your own? Did you take it from someone? Do you experiment? Does it vary by book?

Inspiration: from a spark to a damp squid

Dave Freer posting: For some of us ideas come easy. Execution is hard (especially for the executee).

For the less brilliant of us, it’s all bloody hard. Look, if you’re all inspiration and no follow-through you’re never going to write anything. But all the hard work in the world can end up as turgid and meaningless as yet another crank-the-handle book without those moments of ‘gotcha’ WOW sparkly lights and YES!!!

I wish I knew how to turn that on at will. Because it has to happen... at least once a book for me. When I simply can’t get the words out fast enough, when the pieces of the puzzle FIT, when the words are just right.

But when I stick... I stick. I have various tricks for unsticking like jumping ahead, reading back. But sometimes that’s futile. It’s my mind telling me the story needs that ‘whoopee’ moment. And unless I find that, it won’t work. You see... I am a synthesist (or a lumper). I have this sort of anti-computer in my head that takes apparently unrelated pieces of apparent garbage... and for no logical reason sticks bits together, making them fit -- possibly making them into real garbage rather than just apparent garbage.

And every now and again it says ‘does not fit. Out of cheese error.’ Occasionally ‘redo from start’

I’ve learned to listen, because the end result otherwise is pointless meaningless crap. Moreover, it’s crap that I hate.

Redo from start requires little explanation.

Does not fit... usually means I need more background. Need to remix. I have the SOME of the stimulus pinned down (in a display case. Odd name for a butterfly, but that is scientists for you. Naming odd butterflies that flap their wings and cause hurricanes of ideas... and get long pins stuck through them) to make it happen for me. Firstly I need read up my background sources, and then to clear the decks and focus hard (desk stripped of books to the wood) . E-mail and Internet disconnected. Distractions (bills) and emotional upsets need to be dealt with. Take a brisk walk. Climb something. Catch a fish. And I need to do no other writing (or reading). Not jump ahead or work on something else. I’ll swear there is something alcoholic about books because I seem to need good ingredients (albeit sometimes unlikely ones) to ferment a bit.

It can be terrifying when you hit these, especially with deadline looming.

So far the spark has always lit up a Loligo vulgaris for me. Maybe one day I’ll get a Archituethis dux or even a Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni...

Now... I’m selling calamari. If only I could find more people who liked it.

The hectocotylus and other animals (and their love lives)

Dave Freer posting:

It is, to put it mildly, a little odd that so many would be writers are fascinated by the writing process of others. As far as I have been able to fathom: no two writers write in quite the same way. Often the process of any two seem to be so different as to be totally unrelated, possibly acts by different species. It’s rather like studying wasp-pollinated orchids, cephalopods and sharks in order to sort out your love life.

And therein may lie a sequence of answers. The orchid has evolved to look like a lady-wasp, and male wasps (rumored to be rather like Mick Jagger, or at least to belt out "Ah cain't get no..." in waspish) do a remarkable job in fertilizing orchids if failing rather dismally with lady-wasps. The trick is extracting something useful from this. If you’re going to pull male wasps and get something out of the process, you’re going to have at least appear to be something they fancy (which applies rather well to writing).

The cephalopods: well as a rather bizarre story, one the arms of the male squid, cuttlefish or octopus is modified as intromittent organ - called a hectocotylus... And in several of the octopods and IIRC some cuttlefish, this er... breaks off and is left behind... Which resulted in early systemetists thinking it was a parasitic worm (hence the name). Now besides the part about being a parasitic worm applying rather well to some people’s love lives, it also accurately describes writing. If you want to succeed you will have put a part of your being, your heart, your soul and bits you may not wish to expose or lose into this. And it will probably hurt. May be lost forever... And people will probably insult that sacrifice.

And as for sharks... well, I’m not going to go into the gory and bizarre detail. If that aspect helps your love life... I suggest your partner gets a restraining order and you seek professional help! But in general terms the one thing about sharks is that the male shark is, shall we say, persistent. And nothing could be more vital advice to anyone who wishes to write.

Ergo: what you take out of reading about my writing processes may be more of a reflection of you and your needs than about my rather insane methods, but I hope they help you anyway. There is no 'right' way. And biology is fascinating and far more weird than most people can imagine. I often suspect some writers turned to fantasy to escape the mundanity of their ordinary work. I suspect I escaped into fantasy because it was more plausible than the reproduction of Callorynchus capensis.

At them moment I am busy with a solo fantasy novel, and have had some issues with plot and structure. More on that next time...