Xandra Gregory

If you’re a writer, what’s your writing process like? Do you write, and pronounce it golden, having plotted out, hashed and rehashed your ideas before typing “Chapter One?” Or do you start from some arbitrary point and write whatever emerges from your subconscious, and then when the dust settles, you tear it apart, keep what works and chuck what doesn’t? Or does your writing process involve a combination of all three, and maybe a little something else.

Mine seems to change over time. Way back when I was young and foolish, I believed every word I wrote was Pure Gold. Now, of course, I realize that much of it was as cheesy as the K-Tel albums of the same name. Honestly, I couldn’t really figure out how to revise what I’d written, without serious outside help.

Many years later, of course, I now have a much better grasp on the mechanics of story–of plotting, and character arcs…and of revision. I know how to distill the essence of a scene and identify the points it makes and why it’s there…and sometimes even why it is where it is. To be fair, I did go to school for this a long time ago, but only for other authors’ work (authors who were, 90 % of the time, quite dead, and whose works had at least four hundred years to percolate through societal consciousness).

Right now, however, I’m currently caught between two processes. One is outlined by Karen Wiesner’s First Draft in 30 Days system. The system is actually a method for developing a very detailed outline in those 30 days, and counting that outline as the “draft.”  It’s very useful for people like me, who have limited formal writing time.    Having a scene outlined, knowing where it goes and why, and knowing what needs to be in it, is a theoretical savior of huge chunks of writing time and huge chunks of rewriting.  It allows you to perfect the plot progression before you write huge swathes of story that suddenly make no sense once you realize the story you want to tell isn’t the one you started out telling.
However, my second method is full of processes that are intrinsically appealing to me.  If you’ve ever been involved in NaNoWriMo – National Novel-Writing Month, or a BIAW – Book In A Week, you can understand the advantages of turning off your internal editor and just rolling with your instincts as far as they’ll take you.  For those of us who are obsessive about putting our characters in the perfect set-up, or who plot from a point that happens fairly early in the story, this “blast through until the end no matter how sucky it seems” approach helps us get past the obsessive noodling, and forces us to make the rest of the story into more than just an amorphous future blob of “To Be Written” brainmush.

I’ve just completed a novella for a Liquid Silver anthology slated for Halloween ‘06 entitled A Witch In Time.  My contribution is, of course, the futuristic portion, and came in at just over 17,000 words.  But I didn’t write 17,000 words.  It was more like 35,000.  I started the story, wrote it about halfway, and then realized that this was not the droid I was looking for.  This story wasn’t the one I was writing.

So I ripped it apart and started again.  And again.  And again.  Until finally, my critique partner, the lovely and talented and just a bit twisted Roxy Harte suggested that I do something just wacky and off the wall.  “I’d love to see some sex on a parade float,” she said.

And the current incarnation of “Hounded” was born.

So hat tip to Roxy for kicking my creativity in the head…or in her case, flogging it where it hurts.

I started out writing Hounded with the 30-days method of plotting, so I fortunately did have a plot–at least an idea of where I wanted the story to go, events-wise.  A few days with Rox faithfully flogging me to write this scene or that helped me get to the scenes I needed to write.  In essence, I took two extremes in terms of writing process,  and found a happy middle ground.

It still shocks me.

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This entry was posted by Xandra on Thursday, June 22nd, 2006 at 11:49 am and is filed under A Witch In Time, An Author's Life, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.