Given that I feel like I’m still at the beginning of my writing journey, despite having toyed with writing since early High School years, I often find myself picking up books about writing. From the classics of King and Le Guin, to the ones I find on Story Bundle or free in the Kindle store, I find them endlessly fascinating. I usually get a couple of interesting ideas to knock around in my head, trying to see if they fit into the model I have for how to write a book well.
Many of the books by non-famous writers are rather small, often less than 75 pages, making them quite quick reads. And I note that my willingness to take the advice seriously has a significant correlation to the number of books they have published, whether that’s traditional or self-published. Books from authors who have more works published through traditional presses are read more for the lessons they can teach about quality writing, while those from authors who lean more towards self-publishing are read more for the mechanical aspects of getting words on to paper.
Recently, several of the books that I have found myself reading are on boosting productivity when writing. It’s a laudable goal, and one I ultimately aspire to myself. The more I can get written, the more I can get out in front of reader eyeballs, the more likely I’ll be able to build a name for myself. As in many books about writing, these books are falling into one of two camps, pro-outlining or anti-outlining.
Be a Writing Machine and it’s sequel Be A Writing Machine 2, by Michael La Ronn and Writing Into The Dark by Dean Wesley Smith are both odes to throwing away your outline and writing fearlessly from your heart, since any writer who has read a lot and watched enough TV and movies knows what a good story is, and outlining limits the creative mind. They both believe your first draft should be good enough to be your only draft, with Smith advocating a kind of continual revision approach that I think makes the single draft goal achievable.
These ideas are interesting to me because I do sometimes find that outlining is tedious and writing a draft from an outline can feel like redoing my homework just for the sake of neater handwriting.
At the other end of the spectrum are Write Better, Faster by Monica Leonelle, Story Engineering by Larry Brooks, and First Draft in 30 Days by Karen S. Wiesner. Each of these books emphasize the absolute need for a detailed outline before committing words to the manuscript. They all tout the virtues of working all of the kinks and problems with your story out in advance by working though them in your outline. If while working on the outline you discover a dead end, it’s better to find that as part of writing a 20 page outline than 200 pages into your manuscript.
This also has great appeal, since I can easily see myself, lacking confidence in my abilities, wandering off into an impassable wilderness while trying to write without an outline and having to toss thousands of words into the recycle bin because I missed that left turn at Albuquerque.
As these things often do, it’s a war between the “Plotters” and the “Pantsers” (noting that “Pantser” is often seen as a derogatory term by those who prefer descriptors like “Discovery Writers” or “Wanderers”), with both sides accusing the other of engaging in huge wastes of time. Outliners point at the massive need for revisions on the part of most Non-Outliners, and of throwing away large chunks of manuscripts (and writing time) due to falling down a rabbit hole that could have easily been prevented if they had only written an outline first. And the Discovery writers crying that writing an outline is a waste of time because who really follows their outline to the end of the manuscript?
Ultimately, my process will sit somewhere between these two extremes. I already know my process well enough to know that I cannot successfully write a scene unless I know what I need the scene to accomplish. Each scene must have a purpose, and when I don’t really know what the purpose is, I find I start writing fractally, each paragraph expanding detail but moving the story forward in decreasing increments, like some weird variation on Xeno’s Dichotomy Paradox. When I know what the scene must accomplish, and I know the characters well enough, writing my target number of words is fast and easy (in fact, sometimes too easy).
However, when writing a detailed outline for each scene (or as Ms. Lenoelle aptly refers to it, a sketch of the scene), I find myself just aching to write the scene. Knowing the purpose of the scene and some bare details of it (who should appear, where it will happen, the POV character, etc.) seems to be all I need to make the scene appear on paper. This also allows for the “discovery” of details while writing that make the story richer and deeper, details that I then can push forward into the rest of the outline.
Anyway, that’s my diverting thought for the day. Time to get back to brainstorming about what the heck I’m going to write about for NaNoWriMo.
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