Process is a funny beast
I’ve realized something new about how I work, and it might be useful to other people.
I sometimes have a hard time starting or continuing a project because I tend to get hung up on feeling like I don’t know enough to start writing. SO I stall to do more research, or more planning, to feel like I have an idea of where to go next.
Except when I start writing anyway, it turns out I figure stuff out as I’m going along. And sometimes I have to write past something that feels cursory or ungrounded to figure out what’s actually going on and dig into the complexity of the thing I am writing.
Which is fine, except then I have to go back and change things I have already written, which means doing a lot of iterative editing to bring stuff up to speed. And then I get to the end of the piece and discover I have to go back and build even more in that I didn’t think of until then.
I’ve been writing this way for my entire life as an author, mind. This is nothing new. And I knew about the iterative process and having to edit repeatedly.
But the avoiding-starting-because-I-haven’t-figured-out-stuff-I-will-only-figure-out-by-writing is a new revelation, and I think if I can bear it in mind, will prove to be a useful one.
Of course, this whole process contravenes a lot of the standard issue writing advice, such as “push straight through” and “don’t go back and edit anything until you’ve finished a draft.”
It turns out that a lot of standard advice is not actually widely applicable: it’s just what worked for the particular person giving the advice, and processes can vary widely and offer wildly different results from artist to artist.
Which is why we all have to find and understand our own processes, which is a struggle for a number of reasons.
One of those reasons is because there are so many people shouting advice at us about How To Be A Writer: “You must write every day!” “You must write a certain minimum number of words every day!” “You must never revise until the draft is complete!” and so on.
Another is that it’s easy to get insecure and start wondering if what your friends are doing isn’t better than what you do. I have a friend that uses a lot of formalisms to write, for example. They plot out all their beats and character arcs in advance, and they know exactly how many scenes from the beginning or end of the book each one will fall.
This seems very appealing to me, but when I have tried doing it the result was a clusterfuck. I need to feel my way through the arc based on vibes or something, and get my structures from the inside out rather than the outside in.
That doesn’t make either of our processes better. It just makes them different.
The time to try to adjust your process, however, is the moment when whatever you are doing is not working anymore. (Or possibly was never working?) If you’re not finishing structurally sound stories that reach their intended audience, something technical probably needs to shift.
The trick is, of course, finding what needs to shift and shifting it. And doing it without beating yourself up about it. And as always, when I say you here, I really mean me.
So I’m hopeful that I can remember this new revelation, and in those periods when a story just isn’t ripe yet and I am spinning my wheels, remember that sometimes what I can do to help it ripen is to start writing it anyway.
And sometimes what I need to do is walk away and go do something else for a while. But maybe not that frequently?
This stuff is complicated, you know?