I started getting into revisions in my last post, and still have more to say, but I thought maybe I should back up a bit and talk about first drafts.
One of the best things about writing again (apart from the simple fact that I'm writing again) is figuring out what my process is. I never had a process before. And that starts with first drafts.
Or I suppose it starts with ideas but that doesn't feel like a process. They're ideas. They just...happen. Usually I think of a scene, or a piece of dialogue or inner monologue that leads to a scene, but sometimes it's a just a concept. Even when I wasn't writing I would get ideas. I keep them all in a folder in my Bear app called Seeds.
But first drafts are what I'm here to talk about, so here are my main takeaways so far after doing it twice.
Not a plotter.
I do not plan things out, and boy, do I wish I would have realized this years ago. I have stacks of notebooks in various states of fullness where I tried to figure out entire novels without actually writing a word of the story itself.
It'd be nice if I could say that, despite not doing any writing, I managed to come up with some great stories. But I never did. I wrote in circles because nothing ever made sense. If this, then that. And if that, then maybe something else. But if something else, then what? Maybe not this then. Back to the beginning again.
It never worked but I kept at for years because I thought that's what you did to write. I'd applaud my own perseverance except I think it's just the definition of insanity.
One day though I felt like going back to an idea I'd written a few scenes for a while back. Over the last fifteen years, sitting down to try and write was like catching a cat that did not want to be caught. I approached with extreme caution and trepidation, pretending like I wasn't going to terrify it and send it running away when we both knew full well that I would terrify it and send it running away, leaving everyone traumatized and disappointed.
I had a lot of baggage is what I'm saying and so sat down that day with very little confidence. But I decided I didn't care where I went with anything I wrote, I was just going to write whatever felt good and have some fun messing around with the character I'd created. (I'm going to give credit here to Charlie Jane Anders' book Never Say You Can't Survive which I'm ashamed to say I never finished but which talks about going on no-pressure "first dates" with stories in order to find the right one. That no doubt had lodged itself into my sub-conscious and helped get me to this point.)
So I messed around. And then maybe the next day, maybe a few days later (it was last year so details are fuzzy), I went back to it and messed around some more. And then I kept coming back to it. Kept following whatever notion I had about what the character might do or where she might go. And the word count kept going up.
To go back to the cat analogy (I have cats if that was unclear), this is the moment when, after trying and trying to grab the little asshole, you sit down to rest and it jumps on your lap, so you act real cool, like, no big, until it settles down, maybe purring a bit and you're petting it and it's nice but you can't relax because what if you move wrong and it runs away again?
After a fair amount of messing around, I didn't quite have a plot yet, but I did have a character arc. I knew what Imogen thought she wanted and I knew, emotionally, where she was going to get to at the end. I didn't know how exactly she was going to get there, but I wanted to find out, and for the first time ever, I was thinking I was maybe ok with that position.
Not knowing is good but not knowing is scary.
It's terrifying in fact! Over a year later and I'm still a little terrified. Terrified that the cat's going to run away again.
Both in the first draft of Imogen & Finn's story and the first draft of Audrey & Theo's, I was in a constant battle of trying to let go and just write, and trying to plan and control the big picture. Audrey & Theo's draft was both better and worse. Better because I had some idea of what to expect and a tentative acceptance of this No Planning approach, and worse because I was starting with significantly less.
At some point I'll write a post (or several) about the origin and evolution of the Nerd-Do-Wells stories, but for now, I'll just say that I had a setup, or a conceit, for Imogen & Finn when I started. Working on that story, I found Finn's friends--Theo, Brody, and Rowan--and I knew as soon as I met them that this was a series and their group was the connecting thread.
It was a wonderful moment. But it also meant that the other three stories had no setup. Until the final two did. Elements of Brody's and Rowan's stories became very clear to me while working on Imogen & Finn. Which just left Theo, who I knew had to be story two, with no setup and no character arc. I truly had nothing but the characters I'd established in story one.
There was so much messing around with Audrey and Theo, trying to figure them out, trying to figure out some kind of emotional growth, trying to figure out a plot, and I remember getting panicky at the beginning, feeling completely clueless. Part of which was due to having just left two characters who I knew like best friends and was comfortable writing about and then--bam. Here I was starting from scratch with people I barely knew.
But as scary as it is, first drafts are genuinely fun. It's the Getting To Know You part of a relationship which, for my money, is the best part of any romance story.
Order doesn't matter.
I always thought stories should be written in order because...well, it just made sense. Turns out it does not make sense. At least not for me and my first drafts.
Messing around truly is just messing around. I write a scene because I want to put the characters in a certain scenario and see how it plays out. Sometimes, after seeing where that scene goes, I want to write what immediately follows. Just as often though I have an idea for a totally different scenario that would happen much later. Or before. Or maybe won't end up happening at all.
I stopped caring too much about holding onto any given scene, no matter how much I liked it, because there were always more scenes to write and more than anything else, all of the scenes, the ones that worked and the ones that didn't, were all helping me figure out who my characters are.
I know no one (in the beginning).
Similar to my being Not a Plotter, I am also Not Someone Who Knows Who Their Characters Are Before I Start Writing (thought I had something pithier, but turns out I didn't).
Also like plotting, I thought character backgrounds were essential to writing. I'd see those sheets you can find online that writers were meant to fill in for their characters--name, birth date, hometown, job, eye color, favorite food, third grade teacher's name--and I would get so overwhelmed and confounded. How on earth was I supposed to know any of this, much less all of it?
The problem was putting the cart before the horse. Writing scenes is how I get to know the characters. In fact, I'm going to say writing scenes is how the characters reveal themselves to me, and I'm going hate it a little bit. Like 45%. Maybe 55%. It's the kind of thing I always hated hearing or reading from other authors talking about their work, making the act of writing into this mystical, woo-woo phenomenon that they sort of weren't responsible for? They're just "conduits"?
Part of my vitriol is an instinctive dislike of woo-woo. But most of it I think is the implicit suggestion that writing is something out of your control and therefore something you can't develop or work on. You either have it or you don't. Bullshit.
The big BUT here is that there is some measure of truth, for me anyway, to the idea that characters aren't people you create but people you meet. I could make them say or do any old thing, but it's not going to sit right if it's not what they would actually do or say. So, drafting becomes more like listening. If I put you in this scenario, will you do this? No? Ok. What about this? I can't change how anyone behaves in a situation, and if I don't like how they're behaving, in the sense that it's seriously derailing the story, then the most I can do is not give them the opportunity to be in that situation.
That got woo-woo after all. It might be my advancing years. But if a touch of woo is what it takes to get me to a happy, productive place with my writing, I'll just learn to live with it.
Comments