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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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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.