Quote:
Originally Posted by Steven Lyle Jordan
In the meantime, let's try something new: Discussing how people do this writing thing. We've been flogging "inspiration" long enough... maybe we should move on to "perspiration," i.e., the work involved in writing.
I'll start: Writing, for me, isn't that hard. The hard part is figuring out what to write, and how to write it. Outlines, character designs, element notes, drafts, all that has to be done before I can write the first word of a story. Once I have all that, and I figure out where in the story to start, the words just start to flow, and the flow doesn't stop until I'm at the end.
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I'm somewhat the reverse of you. I have to just START, from go, with nothing. I don't outline, I don't do character design, and I don't figure out the plot, until I've already begun. Once I'm off and running, I do that stuff.
I frequently wind up deleting the opening of whatever I'm writing, though. Perhaps that's how I "outline." Just put words on the page and let the ideas and the characters grow organically, then snip and shape them into a nicer-looking hedge.
I just can't know any of those things until the mood and sweep of the story has oriented itself. And I feel like that's something I can't plan for - I'm not sure what I'm going for until I get there.
I also write a lot of random snipets of prose that wind up being integrated into something else later. I'll often spend quite a long time getting hit with random spells of, dare I say it, inspiration, and writing short prose pieces. And then at some point I'll gather all those ideas together and fit them into a story - because they belonged together to begin with. I just didn't know it yet.
But, much more frequently than that creative, drifting process, I'm writing articles on deadline. I don't outline for these either, apart from research - I have the style so well-memorized that I rarely think about it. It just flows. It has to - it's due in an hour!
I've been writing since I was a wee child, and really, it's only starting to get good now. I can always write. Even when I don't want to. My voice and style is getting to the point where it's well-established enough that I can always churn out a good piece. I'm almost never happy with anything, but the only thing that matters is that it does what it's supposed to.
In general, I'm a disorganized but prolific writer. I'm a scatter brain with 14 thousand writing folders on my computer and thousands of paper pages flitting around my room, whose editor is constantly vacillating between tearing his hair out and weeping for joy. Somehow I manage to get the job done, but to this day I'm not sure how.