a question for writers

[cellio]

This question is directed toward two groups: people who have completed fiction works, and people doing NaNoWriMo (national novel-writing month).

How do you structure your writing? Do you write your story linearly from beginning to end (not counting editing passes)? Or do you jump around, leaving place-holders for things you'll fill in later?

My impression, based on only a few data points, is that people doing NaNoWriMo tend to start at the beginning and write the story in order. (NaNoWriMo is all about cranking out the initial draft in a short period of time, so editing is discouraged.) I write fiction rarely and as a hobby only, but I've found that I tend to jump around somewhat -- I may start out writing linearly, but then I'll insert something like "[wild night in bar goes here]" so I can write the next part, because I'm not feeling inspired to write about wild nights right now but I do have inspiration for the aftermath. Do people who write fiction more seriously do that, or am I just quirky?

I find myself wondering whether NaNoWriMo builds productive habits, encourages destructive habits, or is just plain orthogonal to conventional writing.

Comments

NaNoWriMo and Me.

[wetdryvac.livejournal.com]

(Thank dmnsqrl for my ending up in your pages)

Bugger that. I write every day, and I do novel material, but I don’t sit down and say that this month I’ll be writing a novel. Or part of a novel. I typically have five or six project on the burners at any point, but I do not write fiction to a deadline. The distinction I make is that research papers, technical manuals, stuff like that are generally deadline driven, generally dull as dry sausage, and can be made effective and interesting by process. Creative stuff, in order to be creative, has to be done in a setting without the same degree of organization.

Now, this may only be true for me, and even I will make exceptions. If someone has something they want me to write, and it’s something I’d normally do for fun, I’ll accept a deadline on it – from the three minute poem drill to the short story day drill. Trick is, it has to be done in a sitting – if I get up and come back to something half an hour later, odds are I’ve no longer got that particular writing mode going.

Regarding the beginning to end stuff – generally, yes. If it’s a poem, I find that I don’t even come back for an editing pass. I tend to think that a poem falls as it will, and that fiddling with it after it falls is cheating. Yeah, I also think I might be crazy, but when I was starting out, any time I tried to edit a poem, I messed it up worse. Finally decided that I'd never edit another poem - if the poem wasn’t good, I’d post it publicly somewhere for ridicule and get on with my life. Since that point, I’ve written three – out of more than 1000 poems – that I’ve had to post by those rules. The no net rule forces me to focus.

In technical writing, I go from an outline, and back and fill like crazy. I generally have five or six documents open at a go, a physical layout beside me with a pencil, and research material open on a second computer. I can make tech writing easy to understand and interesting by doing it that way – but not fiction.

For longer fiction, I tend to write a chapter in a sitting, but go back and close edit it after the fact – generally with a week’s lag between the write and the first edit, and then another week before the second edit. As such, each chapter has the same mind behind it, but doesn’t suffer from either the intensity of a poem, and I can cull stuff afterwards. I never back edit while writing, and I always make myself wait – otherwise, I’ll look at something and get frustrated. I feel no embarassment about going back and reading my own work for pleasure, either - even if I'm close editing. When I write for fun, I'm writing for me - and I generally like what I come up with, even when it needs fixing.

In anything I write, I generally have a back-world going. I run role-playing games for people a lot, and it’s similar to the idea of just having characters living against whatever happens, sticking their noses any which-old-where, and trying to live as best they can. The world does whatever the world does, running in my head, and the characters interact with it from there. The closest I come to writing out of order is memories, not in a flashback style, but as, “I remember,” where the character in question contrasts memory with something.

I’m told it’s nuts to write without an outline, but I find stories tend to write themselves, and while I might get bored one day and do up a prospectus type outline, I don’t hold myself to it even a little bit. The story goes wherever it wants, an takes as long as it takes to get done.

That said, I’ve done the official drill of 100k words by outline. It was readable, interesting, and almost painfully similar to a tech manual; never again.