I accept these things as true
Sometimes I think the key to writing better is figuring out how you write, then accepting your process. Vague, right? Well let me tell you a story;)
One of the hardest parts of writing for me is finishing a story. (Ironically the second hardest for me is getting the first ten percent of the tale on the page. I'm a middle writer, through and through. But I digress.)
So back before I knew what I was doing, I would just finish whatever grabbed me. For the most part this worked. Stories would languish on the ole hard drive for months on end until one day, I'd open the file, fiddle with it a bit and then bam, I was on a deathmarch, putting down anything to get to those "the end".
It worked for me. Endings have never been my forte, but the endings in these stories largely made sense. People could see the arc of where things went and why and they even enjoyed some of them. I wasn't satisfied but there were much bigger issues to worry about back then, like overeliance on dependent clauses and "ing" verbs. (Yes, I know, I'm still working on the dependent clause thing;) )
But as I started to get better at characterization, description, world-building, and other aspects of the other craft, plotting kept lagging behind. The consensus of writerly advice then was that you just have to keep writing to the end. This "procrastination" I had been doing with the story, by leaving it for months for other bon mot ideas that filled my brain was lazy and I would never really be a writer until I just finished them.
Or at least that is what I heard.
So I tried. Oh my goodness, how I tried to follow this advice. I forced myself to stay with a tale and pull it out onto the page. The stories came out horribly broken plot wise. And no matter how many rewrites I went through, I couldn't make them work. "Night of a Thousand Dreams" is one of these stories. I revised that story about ten times, and rewrote at least four different endings for it from scratch. Nothing catches.
This led me to the fear/belief of "all I am is stylist pretending to be a writer." I mean my descriptions kept on getting better, and my characterizations were not too shabby, just like those people said they would with practice. But plot, plot was an elusive thing that wanted nothing to do with me.
I tried to ignore it, and kept on writing, with the belief that it would go away. Like a cough or sniffles, this was just a phase and soon I would be back to writing sensical stories with real plot.
Viable Paradise forced me to face the truth. This wasn't happening. I had a real problem with plotting and it had nothing to do with practice.
My brain could still come up with a hundred different twists and turns for a story. I could craft bzyantine constructions and layers of actions that resonanted with each other, but I couldn't close the loop.
But VP was also gave me the answer. Which was basically: find your own process, embrace your process, live your process. Or in VP bitch style: write your own damn way.
Since then, I have been climbing out of the past three years of plot hell.
All this leads up to the realization that I have two main stages when it comes to plotting.
The first I like to call "spaghetti on the wall." That is, I throw everything I can think in terms of plot implications on the frame of the story and see what sticks. This for me is the funness of the middle. You can do anything, take your character anywhere, have them experience any number of countless epiphanies about themselves, their world, or their fate while stumbling across vistas of sensawunda.
The second stage is the "long simmer". This is usually follows directly after the spaghetti stage. I can't really describe much about this process. Basically, I know I've hit this stage when I feel my subconscious is just digging in its heels.
Not digging in its heels because its tired of the story, or wants to do something shiny. But digging in because it just doesn't know. It needs time to process the pattern I've created and try to figure out how to bring it into focus for the end.
Oh, I could try to find my way forward on my own. But the end result is beautiful, broken stories that haunt me. Like "Night of a Thousand Dreams."
No more. I've accepted that I will not be a fast writer. Correction, I will not be able to produce a single story fast. This is something I learned from matociquala, the concept of having a stove full of stories simmering, all started at different points so that you always have something to work on that is ready to be worked on.
Right now for instance, I just opened a short story I started back in August. It had stalled at the closing scenes then and even though I really wanted to just finish it, I waited. And this time when I read through it, something clicked. I knew the ending, knew it so much I could see, taste, hear, feel it. That story is now front and center, while another short story I started in Janaury has reached the first simmer stage. I had the surface layer plot and the bottom layer plot, but the in-between layers are sadly nowhere to be found. That one is willfully back in my subconscious to be mulled over.
Oh and this worked on the collaboration with ljgeoff too! Right now we are going through the rough draft, and cleaning it up to be critted. Something had been bugging me about the ending since we first finished the tale. It wasn't as strong as the rest of the story, and it came to me that one of our secondary characters might hold the key. The simmer process went a lot faster, because I was able to hand that nugget over to Lisa who blew it out into an entire plot thread that will make the story so much tighter, deeper, cleaner, better, that it makes me want to dance. There is nothing like having a plot come together.
Oh to be sure, there is a point to finishing things. Even though I know the ending for the August story, its still a slog, and I will have to go back and fill in holes, rework the opening, and a scene that I had no idea why it was there now has to become a pivotal turn in the plot. But the subconscious is working with me, handing me the nuggets I need to finish it. Writing is hard enough without trying to crack your brain open.
Long post just to say, this is my process and I'm going to respect it.
One of the hardest parts of writing for me is finishing a story. (Ironically the second hardest for me is getting the first ten percent of the tale on the page. I'm a middle writer, through and through. But I digress.)
So back before I knew what I was doing, I would just finish whatever grabbed me. For the most part this worked. Stories would languish on the ole hard drive for months on end until one day, I'd open the file, fiddle with it a bit and then bam, I was on a deathmarch, putting down anything to get to those "the end".
It worked for me. Endings have never been my forte, but the endings in these stories largely made sense. People could see the arc of where things went and why and they even enjoyed some of them. I wasn't satisfied but there were much bigger issues to worry about back then, like overeliance on dependent clauses and "ing" verbs. (Yes, I know, I'm still working on the dependent clause thing;) )
But as I started to get better at characterization, description, world-building, and other aspects of the other craft, plotting kept lagging behind. The consensus of writerly advice then was that you just have to keep writing to the end. This "procrastination" I had been doing with the story, by leaving it for months for other bon mot ideas that filled my brain was lazy and I would never really be a writer until I just finished them.
Or at least that is what I heard.
So I tried. Oh my goodness, how I tried to follow this advice. I forced myself to stay with a tale and pull it out onto the page. The stories came out horribly broken plot wise. And no matter how many rewrites I went through, I couldn't make them work. "Night of a Thousand Dreams" is one of these stories. I revised that story about ten times, and rewrote at least four different endings for it from scratch. Nothing catches.
This led me to the fear/belief of "all I am is stylist pretending to be a writer." I mean my descriptions kept on getting better, and my characterizations were not too shabby, just like those people said they would with practice. But plot, plot was an elusive thing that wanted nothing to do with me.
I tried to ignore it, and kept on writing, with the belief that it would go away. Like a cough or sniffles, this was just a phase and soon I would be back to writing sensical stories with real plot.
Viable Paradise forced me to face the truth. This wasn't happening. I had a real problem with plotting and it had nothing to do with practice.
My brain could still come up with a hundred different twists and turns for a story. I could craft bzyantine constructions and layers of actions that resonanted with each other, but I couldn't close the loop.
But VP was also gave me the answer. Which was basically: find your own process, embrace your process, live your process. Or in VP bitch style: write your own damn way.
Since then, I have been climbing out of the past three years of plot hell.
All this leads up to the realization that I have two main stages when it comes to plotting.
The first I like to call "spaghetti on the wall." That is, I throw everything I can think in terms of plot implications on the frame of the story and see what sticks. This for me is the funness of the middle. You can do anything, take your character anywhere, have them experience any number of countless epiphanies about themselves, their world, or their fate while stumbling across vistas of sensawunda.
The second stage is the "long simmer". This is usually follows directly after the spaghetti stage. I can't really describe much about this process. Basically, I know I've hit this stage when I feel my subconscious is just digging in its heels.
Not digging in its heels because its tired of the story, or wants to do something shiny. But digging in because it just doesn't know. It needs time to process the pattern I've created and try to figure out how to bring it into focus for the end.
Oh, I could try to find my way forward on my own. But the end result is beautiful, broken stories that haunt me. Like "Night of a Thousand Dreams."
No more. I've accepted that I will not be a fast writer. Correction, I will not be able to produce a single story fast. This is something I learned from matociquala, the concept of having a stove full of stories simmering, all started at different points so that you always have something to work on that is ready to be worked on.
Right now for instance, I just opened a short story I started back in August. It had stalled at the closing scenes then and even though I really wanted to just finish it, I waited. And this time when I read through it, something clicked. I knew the ending, knew it so much I could see, taste, hear, feel it. That story is now front and center, while another short story I started in Janaury has reached the first simmer stage. I had the surface layer plot and the bottom layer plot, but the in-between layers are sadly nowhere to be found. That one is willfully back in my subconscious to be mulled over.
Oh and this worked on the collaboration with ljgeoff too! Right now we are going through the rough draft, and cleaning it up to be critted. Something had been bugging me about the ending since we first finished the tale. It wasn't as strong as the rest of the story, and it came to me that one of our secondary characters might hold the key. The simmer process went a lot faster, because I was able to hand that nugget over to Lisa who blew it out into an entire plot thread that will make the story so much tighter, deeper, cleaner, better, that it makes me want to dance. There is nothing like having a plot come together.
Oh to be sure, there is a point to finishing things. Even though I know the ending for the August story, its still a slog, and I will have to go back and fill in holes, rework the opening, and a scene that I had no idea why it was there now has to become a pivotal turn in the plot. But the subconscious is working with me, handing me the nuggets I need to finish it. Writing is hard enough without trying to crack your brain open.
Long post just to say, this is my process and I'm going to respect it.