Linear Or Not, The Story’s Going DOWN
It’s Friday again, which means another chapter of Selene is live. And it’s time for another writing post. This time I have a subject I promised to treat–the irrepressible Fanbot*, this last week, asked me if I work on stories in a linear fashion, or in a non-linear fashion. (I did type “non-linearly” but my inner editor twitched and foamed at the mouth pretty hard on that one, for some effing reason.)
The answer is, it varies. Before I get started, though, check out this news item about a Japanese movie dealing with the idea of “cruel art”. I found that fascinating–but let’s stay on target, shall we?
Let’s assume that I’m under deadline for a piece of writing. This is a good assumption because the overriding objective I have (especially when under deadline) is to finish the damn piece. (Please note that I’m not talking about my trunk novels, or about pieces I poke at solely for my own gratification.) To that end, I generally have a daily goal of wordcount; I don’t care where the words go in the story as long as I get enough of them out on a daily basis.
I also do not care if those words are GOOD according to the censor in my head. At the point of sheer brute production, the point where I am creating a whole story, I don’t give a damn whether they’re good or not, I just care that they’re there.
I should back up and explain this a little. I do care about producing quality work. But in the fever-heat of creation, it is so easy for the internal naysayer, that Internal Censor, to kill a work stone-cold dead or trap you in timesuck and ongoing masturbatory revision by the simple feat of saying these words aren’t good enough. During sheer creation quality is not my problem, it’s the Muse’s problem–and things go better when I leave it to that bonbon-eating bitch.
When I talk about “submission to the work”, this is what I mean. You have a story to tell, you just have to get it out. You can fix technical burps and fiddles later, but you absolutely must have a whole corpse of raw footage before you can edit it into a reasonable work of art. That’s why it’s called a “work” of art.
Now (bringing us back to the subject at hand) sometimes the work decides it’s not going to come out in a linear fashion. Sometimes the ending comes first or there’s false starts, I have to do the middle and build the story around one scene (like smoke, actually, which started with the vision of Rose looking into the alley and combat boots twitching from behind a dumpster). Most of the time the book starts with the hook, like Dante Valentine’s very first whispered line (My working relationship with Lucifer started on a rainy Tuesday.) Sometimes it’s the end that I get first, like the crucifixion scene in mirror or the words exchanged between Dante and Lucifer at the very end of To Hell and Back (“Here I stand, Lucifer, and not all the hosts of Hell shall move me”/”Not all the hosts of Hell are necessary, Necromance. Just one.”)
When that happens, it’s horrible for a pantser. Yes, I am a pantser. I write by the seat of my pants. I am not a plotter; a plotter has an outline for the book. (Note that this is a continuum, writers fall in varying points along the continuum. I tend to fall near the pantser end. This is not a value judgment, it’s just an observation.) There is nothing as freaked-out as a pantser who has to trust that all these disparate chunks of text will somehow turn into a coherent book. If I do indeed have an ulcer, I am sure worrying about the chunks of steaming text I have to fit together is a small but significant part of its inception.
I talk sometimes about “submission to the work” (especially when I have had one too many glasses of wine and get misty-eyed). Strictly put, it is my job to show up each day, every day, and be ready to do the damn work. It is the Muse’s job to provide the story and the thematic elements; at the point where I am writing the zero draft, it is not my problem to worry about whether or not the story is Good Enough.
When I have the whole zero draft, then I can start worrying about Good Enough. And a funny thing happens–when I submit to the story and let the Muse worry about the goddamn quality control during the heat of creation, I go back to that draft weeks later when my eye is fresh and I find stuff I didn’t even know I’d written.
Herein lies the miracle of creativity: Most of that stuff is actually okay, if not pretty good.
I find that the story hangs together in a coherent fashion (most of the time). Sure, there’s defects, both large (structural) and cosmetic, but those are far more easily fixed and stitched together once I have the whole corpse. I can even get you a brand-new ending (my editor for the Valentine series can vouch for this) and tweak the entire level of darkness in a book with relative ease–once I have the whole frocking book out.
It took me a long time to get to the point where I could tell myself not to care about quality while I was creating**. Because while you’re creating, worrying about “quality” is just another way of giving the Internal Censor carte blanche to eff you up bigtime. At the point of actually getting the zero draft out there, don’t worry about whether or not it’s a good story. Just worry about getting the goddamn thing out of your head and onto the paper. As Stephen King had a character say in IT***, it might be a terrible novel, but it will no longer be a terrible unfinished novel.
But I’m drifting again. I do a lot of the work of plotting inside my head, and I work on whatever scene is “hot”–the one I’m “seeing” most clearly inside my noggin at the moment. Sometime the book builds itself from the beginning to the middle and then on to the end, but more often it doesn’t. For example, the current Jill Kismet book is leapfrogging itself in time as thematic elements assemble themselves, and I am still struggling with just getting the work out there and not going back and deleting while I work. (See? Even after eighteen books published and twelve or so unpublished, I STILL struggle with this. It never gets easier, the problems just get more interesting and stubborn.) Either way of working on a piece is fine, as long as I’m making progress toward getting the damn thing done.
The daily goal of wordcount helps me with that. I know a lot of people say, “Well, but focusing on wordcount just creates more stress! It actually blocks me/scares me/makes me avoid writing.”
To which I reply, honey, if that goal scares you, maybe you should find another career. I know a lot of people don’t agree with my “do it every day” ethos, but I’m looking at this problem as someone whose money for rent and my kids’ groceries largely depends on me producing work with reasonable efficiency and quality. Once one reaches a certain point of practice and technique, the quality is there–it’s hard NOT to get better if you keep writing and listening to your editors/beta readers/readers. But you have got to produce before you have any chance of getting better–really, it’s like sex. You stand a vastly better chance of getting some and getting good if you freakin’ show up in the first place. Consistently showing up on the page in the first place is critical to any kind of getting better.
So, my advice to the writers who ask me whether the order you write the story in matters is…don’t worry about that, just worry about the story getting written. Any road you use to get there in a reasonable amount of time is fine. At the risk of trotting out a hackneyed cliche, there is no right way to write a novel. There is only the right way of writing this particular novel, and finding that way can be a matter of trained instinct, dumb luck, or trial-and-error. Let the Muse worry about the order, the thematic bits, the quality control, and the story itself.
That bitch needs to earn those bonbons, dammit.
Over and out.
*Who does the best thrifthorror, and who was kind enough to send me a pair of kung fu kitsch figurines.
**Note that I am still not fully there. It is a process, and one you never get to the end of.
***Which has an amazing number of little tidbits about the creative process in it, by the way.
August 29th, 2008 at 8:31 pm
It’s nice to know I’m not the only one who writes that way. I’ve learned to take what the Muse gives and when, scrabbling up the scraps in any order I can get them, but I hate those frigging scenes that play out perfectly in your head–dialogue included–while you’re someplace where you can’t write them; i.e., while driving or showering or in the middle of the night–no wonder I never get a good night’s sleep.
But tell me, what happens when you get through your second full draft and suddenly have an epiphany that you’ve been coming at this whole thing wrong? I was diddling with my synopsis on my current WIP and had a severe slap-in-the-head moment that even my characters seemed to find hilarious (”you mean you didn’t know that?”) Now I’m rewriting like mad to get all this down before it fades into the ether. I sometimes envy the plotters who write an outline at the beginning and actually FOLLOW it. I’ve never had characters who are that considerate.
August 31st, 2008 at 12:12 pm
As usual, another “right stuff at the right time” post for me to read. I’m just now realizing that I simply cannot worry about quality while I’m writing a first draft. The muse does not suffer censors gladly, and when she senses they’re out of the box, she’s gone. She has better things to do, I guess, than listen to “this isn’t good enough!” melodrama.
I’m also trying to get over whatever it is that makes me feel like I have to write a story from beginning to end in linear fashion. The imagination doesn’t work that way, why should I?