The Best Writing Process
The Best Writing Process
It’ll help insure you get your story out in the world
The Storywriter’s Path
It’ll help insure you get your story out in the world
I’m a big believer in figuring out what works for you in your writing practice and then doing it. Take what you find useful from writing experts, gurus, bloggers and authors — and leave the rest. Just because one bestselling novelist outlines her novel in excruciating detail does not mean that approach will work for you. And vice-versa.
I encourage writers to experiment, pay attention, test strategies and then put them to work. If staying up until 3 AM writing is your thing, pay no attention to people like me who love to get up early and write first thing before the day begins. If creating elaborate maps and character dossiers and plot outlines helps you write your story, go for it, by all means. And if you get an idea and love to plunge in without forethought, be my guest.
However.
There is one bit of writing advice that I stand firm on. I believe every writer should follow what I call the writing process.
The Writing Process
I know, original name. But try as I might, I can think of nothing better. This writing process involves starting with the idea, doing a bit of prep work (or more if you like), and then writing a draft start to finish. I emphasize, start to finish. And then rewriting. And rewriting again. And maybe even again. And then revising — looking at words and grammar and punctuation.
Following this process will allow you to get words on the page, and actually finish writing projects. It will teach you to pour your heart out on paper and shape it into a cohesive story. (And it will teach you much about yourself and your life along the way — but that’s a topic for another day.)
The Idea
You need an idea to begin your novel with. I know, duh. But please choose this idea carefully — you’re going to be working with it for a while. It needs to be capable of holding your attention over the long haul (and over several hundred pages). Sometimes ideas grab hold of me and a couple days later I’m bored with them. So give your idea time to live and breathe a bit before you jump all over it. Maybe it’s not the basis for a novel, but for one aspect of it. Or for a short story or novella.
And bear in mind that the search for ideas is a continual quest. You need lots of them for a novel. The first time I wrote a novel I was shocked at how many things had to happen on the page — and thus how many ideas I needed to generate. I’ll talk more about ideas in a future column. But just remember that the idea is the starting point of it all, and ideas are precious.
Prep Work, or Not
You can do a little preparation, or a lot, whichever best suits your style. I consider myself to fall somewhere in between a pantser (one who writes without pre-planning) and a plotter (one who plans out everything in advance). I like to do some prep work, which gives me a solid starting point, helps to get me excited about the project, and also sparks ideas.
I do research on a need-to-know basis, create character dossiers, figure out settings, and write a loose outline so that I have at least an idea where I want the story to go. I’m the kind of writer that figures out a lot in the actual writing, so after a certain point, usually when I’m itching to get to it, I let myself start writing. And then at various points throughout the writing I’ll do more research, character, and plot work, as needed.
The Discovery Draft
When you follow the writing process, your first step is to finish a draft, often called the rough draft, the discovery draft, or as author Anne Lamott refers to it, the Shitty First Draft. Your job as you write this draft is just that — to write, to get words on the page, to finish the draft. Bonus points for writing fast, as that’s often the best way to get the words directly from your heart onto the page, bypassing the pesky inner critic.
When you get to the end of your first pass through the story you’ll know more than when you started. That’s why the first draft is often called the discovery draft. This draft is about you, the author, laying down the story, figuring it out for yourself. Successive drafts are about deciding how best to present the story to the reader — and adjusting plot lines and character arcs accordingly.
But You’re Not Done Yet
Yes, you’ve slaved over this manuscript and birthed a beautiful, precious thing — a story! But just because you are in love with it doesn’t mean it yet works for the reader. It’s a safe bet that it doesn’t. Because you’ve mostly been worrying about getting words on the page, parsing out the story as you see it in your head.
And now the real fun begins. Like working on putting together a puzzle, you get to deconstruct your story and put it back together again to make all the pieces work as one cohesive whole. And you might end up doing this several times. This is big picture work. You’re not paying close attention to sentence structure and word choice quite yet. Look at plot points, overall story structure, character actions, appropriate and varied settings, and so forth.
And You’re Still Not Done
After you’re certain the story works as well as you can possibly engineer it, now’s the time to go back and look at the finer points of the work. Have you chosen strong verbs? Are your sentences strong and sturdy, and varied in length? Have you made your words sing? Is your punctuation and spelling correct?
Finally, You Are Finished!
Yes? Then, okay. You can consider your story done. Now you get to go celebrate in whatever way you like. And tomorrow you begin the process of getting the book ready to go out in the world. Traditional or self publishing? That’s a topic for another day.
If Not This Process, Then What?
Terrible traumas await. Kidding. Sort of. Writers who don’t follow the process I’ve laid out here have a couple of other options, neither, in my opinion, appealing.
One and Done
Some people advocate the one and done approach — and once you get more experience this might work for you. It involves writing the entire novel in one pass, and it’s not for the faint of heart or inexperienced. Writers who follow this approach do an awful lot of rewriting as they go. For instance, they might hit chapter ten and realize that something happening needs to be set up earlier. So rather than making a note of it for the next draft, they go back and fix the earlier problem right then and there. My experience with hundreds of clients and students tells me this can be a recipe for disaster, because it is too easy to get stuck writing and perfecting the early chapters and not make forward progress.
Oh, the Agony
And other writers pay attention to every sentence, every single word, making sure they are perfect, before they move on. But this approach focuses so much on detail, you risk losing sight of the big picture.
So there you have it — a process you can follow over and over again. Sometimes it will happen quickly. Your story may enter the world more fully formed and not need as many rewrites. And sometimes it may take what seems like forever. But this process will serve you well no matter how long it takes.