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The Novel-Writing Process
Once again, I'm teaching novel-writing at NKU, and I'm curious about other writers' processes. My mantra in class is "There no right way to write," but is there really a wide spectrum? A while back, I wrote a bit about 'process,', but in a nutshell, I looked at:
1): THE PLANNING PROCESS: I know writers who must have every last scene laid out before they start, and others who just start writing and see what happens. I know writers who have put post-notes on a wall with each scene, using different colors for different characters... and I know writers who sit down, pull up a blank file, and start typing with no clue as to what will come next.
2): THE "FIRST COMPLETE DRAFT" PROCESS: Again, there are polar opposites. On one side, we have the NaNoWriMo crowd, who write as fast as humanly possible; on the other, we have the 'James Joyce' school (Joyce reputedly thought that a couple perfect words made a good day of writing.) I assume everyone, from 1 to 10, goes back and revises their first initial draft to polish it up and make it publishable, and that takes as much time as it takes -- probably more for the fast writer than the slow one. I'm just talking about getting that first draft done.
So I'm curious. Where do you fall on those two scales? For the Planning Process, if "10" is the obsessive/cumpulsive planner and "1" is the "just write it and see where it goes" type, where are you? For the First Complete Draft Process, if "10" is someone who can't go on until the previous sentence is perfect, and "1" is the writer who rushes to hit 'The End' in as short a time as they can, where are you?
Me? On the planning side, I'm maybe a "4". I usually know the opening sections, and I have a good idea of where I want the novel to end, but when I start writing, I generally have no clue as to what's going to happen in the middle, nor do I necessarily know all the characters involved beyond the protagonist and primary supporting characters. I'm about a "6" in the drafting process, neither terrifically fast nor slow, but a little more on the slow side than the fast side. Very little of my initial draft will be pure first draft, since I go back and forth over it, but always try to get some 'forward progress' every day. My 'first complete draft' is actually a second-to-fourth draft, depending on how many times I've gone over the various scenes -- and perhaps as a result, my "Revision Process" doesn't take all that long, usually -- maybe a month or two.
What about you?
OH! if you would, also indicate whether you've had a novel professionally published yet (defined as: someone paid you an advance for the work). Please understand, no disparagement is intended with that question (hey, we've all been been at the point where we've yet to sell our first book!) I'm still interested in the data, but I'd like to be able to plot the two sets of data separately to see if perhaps there's a different approach taken by the two groups. I know I approached the task of writing differently when I was starting out than I do now...
1): THE PLANNING PROCESS: I know writers who must have every last scene laid out before they start, and others who just start writing and see what happens. I know writers who have put post-notes on a wall with each scene, using different colors for different characters... and I know writers who sit down, pull up a blank file, and start typing with no clue as to what will come next.
2): THE "FIRST COMPLETE DRAFT" PROCESS: Again, there are polar opposites. On one side, we have the NaNoWriMo crowd, who write as fast as humanly possible; on the other, we have the 'James Joyce' school (Joyce reputedly thought that a couple perfect words made a good day of writing.) I assume everyone, from 1 to 10, goes back and revises their first initial draft to polish it up and make it publishable, and that takes as much time as it takes -- probably more for the fast writer than the slow one. I'm just talking about getting that first draft done.
So I'm curious. Where do you fall on those two scales? For the Planning Process, if "10" is the obsessive/cumpulsive planner and "1" is the "just write it and see where it goes" type, where are you? For the First Complete Draft Process, if "10" is someone who can't go on until the previous sentence is perfect, and "1" is the writer who rushes to hit 'The End' in as short a time as they can, where are you?
Me? On the planning side, I'm maybe a "4". I usually know the opening sections, and I have a good idea of where I want the novel to end, but when I start writing, I generally have no clue as to what's going to happen in the middle, nor do I necessarily know all the characters involved beyond the protagonist and primary supporting characters. I'm about a "6" in the drafting process, neither terrifically fast nor slow, but a little more on the slow side than the fast side. Very little of my initial draft will be pure first draft, since I go back and forth over it, but always try to get some 'forward progress' every day. My 'first complete draft' is actually a second-to-fourth draft, depending on how many times I've gone over the various scenes -- and perhaps as a result, my "Revision Process" doesn't take all that long, usually -- maybe a month or two.
What about you?
OH! if you would, also indicate whether you've had a novel professionally published yet (defined as: someone paid you an advance for the work). Please understand, no disparagement is intended with that question (hey, we've all been been at the point where we've yet to sell our first book!) I'm still interested in the data, but I'd like to be able to plot the two sets of data separately to see if perhaps there's a different approach taken by the two groups. I know I approached the task of writing differently when I was starting out than I do now...
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First Complete Draft: 8
I'm a planner and I can get stuck on a single scene for days or weeks. For my current project, I'm trying to be more of a 4/5. It's scary not to have everything planned, but it's fun to discover what happens next.
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At this point I still write what most people would consider to be fast but what is really much slower than when I was younger. I do revise but many people cannot identify if my initial piece is a draft. I also feel compulsive about removing typos and touching up my grammar even on a first run through.
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First Draft: 2
(Followed by 2nd, 3rd and 4th drafts which counteracts the initial speed).
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Draft Process 4
I know the whole story beginning to end but I don't know exactly how it's going to happen. If I over-plan, it's like over-watering plants. It dies. The year I finished NaNo I did Plan = 10 draft = 3 ('cause really 2K a day isn't *that* speedy) and ended up with a complete story so bad that it wasn't even revisable.
I write fairly quickly, but I can't just stampede forward if I know that what I just wrote is going to need major overhauling. The "any words are good" theory doesn't work for me, but OTOH I don't want to fall into the trap of trying to perfect the first chapter and never moving on. You would not believe how many people I've met who've been working on the same first chapter/first 3 chapters/first 100 pages of their novel for years.
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But on the Complete First Draft side of things, well... I would have said I was about a 9 since I do almost no Revision because I revise constantly as I write but it sounds like you do as well so using your definition of a six...maybe an 8?
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Ah, a general "rule of thumb" has struck me: how many months does it take you to produce the first draft of your manuscript? Divide that by two: that's your number! (And if you take more than 20 months, you're still a "10")
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Planning Process: 2 - 7 depending on the book
Writing Process: 3-ish.
Book-planning is largely subconscious but there are books that have been very convoluted and so I've mapped them more extensively than others.
Book-writing is always "Just get it out and enjoy expanding it in the revision." Nowadays, though, I write clean copy, and I'm lucky if a second draft (on most books) does more than add or detract 2-3 pages.
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And I appreciate your doing so!
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Funny, because she and I were chatting via email about process just this week!
I am an "organic" writer (I think Jenn thinks I'm crazy!).
I've only written two novels and am halfway through with a third, and the process has been different for each one. I wonder if "it depends" is one answer to these questions? I also wonder about the exigencies of writing for a publisher and toward a contracted deadline, because surely those are a factor, as well. In addition, revision, if it happens with an editor, must happen differently.
So my experiences:
Novel one, which is unpublishable (this was my learning-how-to-write-a-novel book): At around 3/4 done, I back-outlined the plot on one looooong piece of paper, though I still didn't know how the book would end. So for planning a 5? It took four years to write--so a 9 for #2, and I was revising pretty sporadically throughout the composition process.
Novel two (which will be published in 2009) (first book in a trilogy): When I started this book, it was going to be a short story; it evolved into a novel which, like the first book, I back-outlined at around 3/4 done (and also with no clue about the ending). It was truly an organic project. So 3 for planning. And it took 8 months to write (I revise recursively, revising as I go, so I'm going to call it a 3). HOWever! I revised for my agent. And the book will be revised yet again, before publication. So do we add on numbers for that?
Novel three (second book in the trilogy): for the first time, I'm writing toward a proposal, which was part of my novel submission package. So we've moved to maybe a 5 for planning, though the novel as it's taking shape is deviating from the proposal, and as usual I have no idea how the plot is going to resolve. And the recursive writing is going at about the same pace: 3?
I wonder how much this process will change for me, now that I'm writing for different purposes and for certain deadlines...
Oh, and I'm with you on this: there's no right way to write!
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Then, if it wasn't up to snuff, I literally throw it away and write the sotry again from scratch. I've only had to do that a couple times, but the books were both better for it, and I think I wound up being a better writer.
If you only ever want to write first drafts, though, I can see you being more careful about it.
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First draft: 3
I usually have major linchpin scenes figured out beforehand, but I don't really know how I'll get from point A to B to C, so there's a fair bit left unplanned. With first drafts I tend to zip on through the writing, with only minimal noodling and adjusting on that first pass.
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First Complete Draft: 2 or 3
It took me a loooooooooong time to figure out how I need to write -- my first rough draft of my first novel took 7 or 8 years (with a 10 year gap between try number 1 and try number 2). As irony would have it, I'm now stuck on the revisions. *smacks forehead*
I ended up using that first novel to develop my process, which I call Novel Plot building. I write in phases, each phase building on the last, until I get to the point where I can write the rough draft. Takes me 4-6 months of continuous work to complete a novel that way (as long as I know the story well -- can take longer if the story needs development or I'm not too sure what I'm doing with it). Since that first novel, I've "completed" the 2 sequels for the trilogy (I played with the process a bit for both of them and they need expanding, thus the quotes around completed) and am now working on something outside that series that will be much easier to revise. I've met the challenge of a complete rough draft, now I need to meet the challenge of a finished novel.
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1) For the planning side I have a two pronged approach. That is, I know where I'm going in my final scene(s) and have all the details of dialogue, blocking, drapery, etc. That said, I then just start writing those scenes necessary to get to that end, mostly from the beginning of the novel but sometimes too in the middle. So on the one hand I'd say there's a '10' in that my final resolution is decided, but a '1' in that the writing itself begins with only a loose framework of actions and events leading to that end.
How this fits into your metric I'm not too sure. There is a lot of 'see what happens', to the extent that in my most recent ms I need to have one of my main character's friends die in the early parts of the book, but I've four or five different versions of the opening where any one of three different characters actually die. Still, one of them *will* die, and in a rather trivial and capricious manner -- that's pretty much set in stone.
2) This is much more simplistic a process, and I'd have to say I'm on near-side of Joyce, perhaps an 8 or 9 -- I'll move on from a bad sentence but nor from a bad scene or chapter, going all the way back to the beginning and revising through to get it right.
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Writing: 3
I create an outline that breaks out the entire novel, chapter by chapter. That outline *does* change as I write, with some chapters breaking into two, and some coalescing into a joint chapter, but the entire shape of the narrative is set when I start to write.
I write relatively quickly, drafting a 5000 word chapter in a day, revising in a day, lather, rinse, repeat, when I'm on Writing Marathon (vacation week from the dayjob.) I used to write more methodically, approximately 500 solid words a day, every day, but the day job schedule doesn't make that easy any more.
I look forward to seeing your graph(s)!
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Number Two -- First Draft Process: Ugh. Totally a nine. I edit as I go. Compulsively. I'm trying to train myself out of it. I have to occasionally whip myself forward and force myself NOT to make any changes. On the upside? It does mean that when I'm done, I tend to be DONE.
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Draft: 7
I recently sold my first novel--not published yet, but will be in 2008 :-)
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Planning - about 5. I have a general outline, much more of the character arc than the actual events. I diverged from the outline quite a bit for the finished novel, and ended up writing the last half with no outline at all, just general plans.
Drafting - again, I'd say about 5. I tend to write between one and two thousand words at a sitting, but not daily. I also back up and reread the last three to five thousand words, and revise as needed. This is partly to keep myself in touch with the story and get back into voice, and partly because I hate having that many words that are terrible.
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Planning: About the most organized I can get would be a 2, which is to have a general idea where "X" lies at the end of the map. I blame the ADD. I've gotten some characters I really like this way, when I let a spear-carrier wander in and start going off in its own direction.
Drafting: Somewhere on the higher side of 5, since a lot of times I don't know What Comes Next until I have a better idea of What Comes RIGHT NOW. So I pick at what I have until the headlights show the next bit, or a bit ten chapters along, whichever (you didn't ask, but no, I don't write sequentially, I capture whichever bits of it happen to wander along and let the bits accrete words until they join up).
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I have not yet published a novel and have not finished a novel-length manuscript at this point.
1) Planning: In actuality, I'm at 4 to 5. I have to have some notes, a rough outline. I always, always feel like I ought to have *more* than that, but if I try to plan too much, I end up killing the poor story. Planning a novel is something I'm still learning to do, and I hope to be better at it in a year or two. For now, I describe the extent of my novel planning as: "some planning, know the beginning and end, have little idea of the middle except for a few key scenes."
2) Drafting: As far as speed goes, I tend to hover around 4 or 5. I'm a slow writer. I've had a difficult time coming to terms with that about myself. But there's always that tortoise...
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I'd say I'm about a 4 like you on planning, maybe a 3. And I'm a 9 or a 10 on not going on if the stuff that comes before isn't right, which sometimes makes me slow but I also sometimes go fast -- "right" doesn't always mean "slow". In fact, I write in bursts, much as I hate it.
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You certainly are! :-) Good stuff, too.