The Inefficient Method of Novel Writing (Part 1) · 2:59am Aug 2nd, 2016
Or: How to Write a Novel in Fifteen Years
Some people asked me about my writing process, because they want to write novels of their own. I’m naming my writing process “the Inefficient Method,” and I’ll outline and blog about the different aspects that make it unique and inefficient.
Some of you will want to take this as mistakes to avoid, and that’s probably a good idea.
But some of you might want to try the Inefficient Method. It might be the best way for you to finish your novel.
The Inefficient Method is NOT good if you want to be the kind of professional writer who makes a living off of writing things. If that’s your goal, you will eventually need to work efficiently. But the Inefficient Method is perfect for if you haven’t really decided if you want to be a writer, or if you already know that writing is going to have to fit around your career and family, or if you have that One Story that you need to write sometime.
In addition, you don’t have to adhere strictly to the Inefficient Method. Over time, I’ve gotten more efficient, but there are certain things I still do which are Inefficient but which make sense with the way I think, or keep me interested, or make writing more fun for me.
I’ve actually already started explaining the Inefficient Method, because step one is
Step 1: Not Writing
Not Writing is a key component of the Inefficient Method, but I pretty much covered it in Some People are not Writers (Yet) And That's Okay. To recap: There will be times when, for any number of totally legitimate and illegitimate reasons, you don’t want to write. The solution to this is Not Writing. If you eventually want to write again, that’s great. If you never want to write again, that’s great too! I don’t know of a single world religion whose afterlife depends on having written a novel.
As I pointed out in that post, this is not intended to be discouraging. It’s just that when there are more important and/or fun things in your life than writing, you should be doing those.
Closely related to Not Writing is…
Step 2: Writer Playtime.
Writer Playtime, aka “messing with your novel,” covers a wide range of activities that have something to do with your novel, but aren’t directly related to actually writing it. This varies from author to author, depending on what they enjoy versus what they need in order to write, but it usually includes:
* Brainstorming
* Outlining
* Research
* Reading writing advice
* Organizing your writing files
* World building
* Silly stuff like taking quizzes as your characters, looking for pictures that look like them, drawing maps, building playlists, etc.
* Writing side stories, backstories, histories, and other things related to you novel which are not your novel
* Really silly stuff like daydreaming of the interviews you’ll give when your novel is a world-wide phenomenon, imagining literary analysis of your work, figuring out what books you’d be next to on bookstore shelves, etc.
Now, if you are an efficient novelist of any kind, 90% of this will be wasted time. You might make an outline, or need to do some research, but you will do that efficiently and get back to writing. For the most part, you should try to avoid it when you can.
If you are using the Inefficient Method, Writer Playtime is vital. Because what playtime does is keeps you thinking about writing, even when you’re Not Writing. And if you’re thinking about writing, there’s a good chance that when you do have the time or inclination that you’ll end up writing. Even less of the stuff that you did during playtime is likely to be useful than it is for efficient people, and Writer Playtime does NOT count as writing your novel. But it can keep you going when you’re too busy, and when the choice is between clicking random Wikipedia articles for people born the same year as your protagonist or watching people eat things they aren’t supposed to on Youtube, the former at least keeps the idea of writing in mind.
Now, there’s a related form of playtime which many of us are familiar with: Writing other things. Taking a break from your novel to work on your other novel, or write 500,000 words of stories about cartoon ponies. This is a dangerous form of playtime if you have one thing which you really want to get done, but it’s a wonderful way for an Inefficient writer to get something done. In my experience, it tends to prevent Not Writing, and as long as you’re writing you’ll probably finish something eventually. But you can’t really predict what that thing will be. So if you’re thinking of engaging in this form of playtime, keep that in mind.
There’s another danger in Writer Playtime, which I always think of as “the genealogies of the racehorses” after a line in the movie Wonder Boys (which is required viewing for any writer.) Basically, you’ve been engaged in playtime and you’ve come up with something that's interesting to you, be it world building or research or character backstory. But the fact that you came up with it does not mean it belongs in the novel. You need to decide for yourself what does belong in the novel, and how it fits, but avoid the temptation to throw things in because you spent time on them.
Personal Experience: Aside from having at least 200k of side stories and sequels in various stages of completion, I know more about the model of truck Maddy drives than I know about my own car, and and I might have photoshopped a few tarot cards and some computer wallpaper using pictures that I found online which I have no legal right to show people. None of this got the novel done any faster. What did get it done faster was purposely not watching MLP until it was finished.
So those are aspects of the Inefficient method of novel writing that are good for not actually producing a novel. But sometime the stars align and you get a chance to write! Keeping Inefficiency in mind, I have to take a stand on a popular debate among writers:
Step 3: Good Parts First.
Writing in order is self-explanatory: you start from the first line and you keep writing until the end, just like you would read. “Good parts first” is where you start with the scenes that excite you most, then, once you’ve written the “good parts” you go back and fill in the gaps.
The question of whether to write in order or "good parts first" is a difficult one... If you're going to be writing steadily, and getting to the good parts in a matter of weeks or months.
The ideas behind being writing in order are, as I understand them:
1) Writing in order makes you push through the boring parts and leaves the “good parts” as a reward.
2) You might change your mind as you write, and writing in order means that you won’t have a lot of writing after that point which is now rendered useless.
Even efficient writers can disagree on these points, but for Inefficient Writers, those are not problems you will have. For one thing, If writing in order was going to push you to write, you’d be writing Efficiently. It might be years before you get to chapter six; by then you'll be lucky if you remember how the good part was supposed to go.
For another thing, I promise you that you’ll change your mind as you write, massively, in a way that requires editing or trashing everything before the change as well as after. But that’s a step I’ll be getting to in a bit.
So, the upsides of writing in order are no good for Inefficient Writers. But there are some upsides to writing “good parts first” that makes it a natural fit.
1) Every time you go back after a period of Not Writing, you’ll be starting in media res. Even if you don’t want to start your novel that way, it does the same thing for a writer that it does for a reader: it creates a sense of urgency and makes your brain start working to fit pieces together.
2) The thing you write first will be the thing you reread most often. Usually the “good parts” are important scenes, so if it’s not working the way you want, you’ll be more likely to see it and have more time to fix it.
Basically, if you’ve been Not Writing for weeks or months or years, which are you going to care more about: the first chapter where you were mostly trying to figure out the least excruciating way to describe your characters, or the epic fight scene over the bottomless pit of despair? Whichever it is that’ll get you going, write it first.
There are dangers to writing the good parts first, even for Inefficient writers. For one thing, if it takes you years to finish, the “good parts” will be the thing you wrote when you were least experienced. There’s a good chance you’ll want to totally rewrite them at some point. And that’s actually good, as long as you don’t get into a cycle of only ever working on the good parts.
The other danger is falling in love with them exactly how they’re written. Like I said, you’re going to change your mind at some point, and you shouldn’t let any one scene keep you from doing that. If you really think you’d like the book better if it was set in New York City, you can’t keep the fight over the bottomless pit of despair. It’s redundant. Let it go.
Personal Experience: After years of Not Writing, what made me give my novel another shot was finding a draft of one scene, from the very first version. The scene was from the middle of the book, and it’s still there now. But reading it reminded me why this book was awesome and I had to try to write it. My first chapter from 15 years ago probably wouldn’t have done that.
So, now we’re actually writing things! Which means it’s obviously time to take a break. Next Monday I’ll talk about changing your mind in the most annoying way possible, and how to write things you don’t want to write.
Since this is a Monday Blog Post, a big thank you to: bats, diremane, First_Down, sopchoppy, Bradel, stormgnome, jlm123hi, Ultiville, Singularity Dream, JetstreamGW, Noble Thought, horizon, Sharp Spark, Applejinx, Mermerus, Super Trampoline, Quill Scratch, Peregrine Caged, blagdaross, Scramblers and Shadows, BlazzingInferno, Merc the Jerk, LegionPothIX, and Themaskedferret.
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I'd disagree about writing in order being a hallmark of the Efficient writer. I write in order, but I've sometimes gone months between chapters.
4127274
I didn't mean to imply that it was. But I do think that it doesn't provide the same level of benefits to Inefficient writers that it offers to efficient ones, while good parts first does provide some benefits that can specifically help Inefficient writers.
4127279 True. I mostly do it because Good Parts First tended to blow up in my face, as the characters would end up evolving in a totally different direction as I wrote. By the time I reached the Good Part, it was totally out of character for everyone involved.
4127282
Yes, that is a drawback. Personally, I found that I as often had to totally rewrite early scenes to account for changes in character and plot as latter ones, but if you do tend to, I guess, fill things in as you go along? Then good parts first isn't going to work as well. I still think it offers the benefit of drawing you back to writing more easily, but there will be more rewriting involved if you are a person who otherwise doesn't rewrite things.
4127288 It's less that I fill things in, more that my characters have a disturbing tendency to disable the link between my brain and my hands and decide that they know what's going to happen next better than I do. The plan for what happens next tends to change on a dime, but I don't care because the new version always makes more sense than the old.
Fifteen years? Small potatoes. My current unpublished and being totally rewritten Swords and Sorcery novel (with sequel hook) has been in various states of doodle for twenty-five. For perspective, I wrote more pony words in my first three months of MLP than I did on my novel in twenty years, and that counts the rewrite in progress.
Guilty as charged.
The fast method (based on my readings), is to write a third of the book (about 33,000 words), write a grant proposal(a really good cover letter), series bible (Candide or similar), Get it copyrighted, get it edited, adapt it into a screen play (becasue fortune favors the bold) and send it off to the screen writers guild. Join a few other guilds, then come up with a blanket letter and send it to every producer, editor, publisher, hen house, and agency you can get the address of until someone takes pity on you (or sees it in their pile of birdcage liners and thinks the title looks good), recognizes your name and reputation, or luck smiles upon you.
To me, it seems like it would be easier to become a professional actor than a professional writer. But, seeing as it appears only those with masters degrees are professionals any more, and most paraprofessionals are about as competent and equipped as any sophomore upon graduation from college I doubt time and chance happen to them all. Especially with people shooting themselves in the foot by mentioning cronyism, nepotism, sexism, and to some degree racism influencing the chances of the final project getting to seed. You can do and make everything yourself, but it takes alot of time, training, and other resources that are readily available much faster to those of higher economic or social status.
This was actually quite interesting to read.
I can say that I have been tempted to write 'the good parts' first but I still stick to writing in order, largely because I might change something, and you do always have to write the boring parts at some point.
I've been recently working on improving my writing methods and outlook. I've been focusing on doing more Not Not Writing.
The toughest part for me is still when it comes time to put it up.
Oh hey, I do that too! Still stuck on stage 2, though.
Hm. Yes, I think this fits:
If you're born with a love for the wrote and the writ
People of letters, your warning stands clear:
Pay heed to your heart and not to your wit
Don't say in a letter what you can't in my ear.
This is me so so so so much, except I'm trying to write a pony novella instead of a novel.
I'm glad for your encouragement, bookplayer, because honestly this is what consumes 99% of my "writing" time. I incessantly jot down little notes, plot details, and story concepts throughout the days and weeks. But after it amasses past a certain point, with no stories actually getting written...it gets kinda depressing.
I found this bit particularly interesting. I don't think I've heard it put that way before: good parts first. I plot and outline out of order, usually with specific details and pieces of dialogue or conversations, but I prefer to actually write in order. I'm not entirely sure what compels me; doing otherwise has always kinda felt like trying to construct the third floor of a house before I've built the first. It's not a very reasonable feeling, I know, as plenty of authors write out of order.
When in the process did you write the ending to Pierside? I know that's very often the bit that gets written out of order, if any is.
This is so true. Writing is just as much about determining what doesn't go in as what does.
4131267
Well, this is part what I was talking about with 4127282 , and part what I'll be talking about next week, but... Which ending?
The first ending was probably the fifth scene I wrote. Then somewhere in there were second, third, fourth, and I think fifth endings, so it's hard to say the order the came in, because in each case some early scenes worked and some got scrapped with the new ending. I can say that the ending I ended up with was written before a lot of the scenes that preceeded it in the narrative.
That was kind of what I was getting at, with it not mattering because you'll change your mind anyway-- a new ending will probably mean needing to change a bunch of scenes before it, whether because of tone and theme, to add set up or foreshadowing (or remove inactive Chekhov's guns), or because there are things from the old ending that you can have happen earlier and you like them.
If you change your mind about the ending after half of the book is written wordcount-wise, you need to rewrite X scenes, with another Y scenes being ones you change on the outline that you hadn't written yet. If you write in order, X is not going to include the ending itself, but it will include more early scenes. (And, from my point of view, more likely ones I didn't want to write in the first place, let alone rewrite.) If you write out of order, X will include the ending, but fewer scenes from the beginning, and Y is more likely to include scenes you didn't want to write anyway.
And I've got an outline for every substantial story I've ever written, but I don't have a single outline that matches a story I've finished.
4131446
No, you're fine, you told me what I wanted to know--namely, that the ending (though it changed) was in your mind early on. I asked because it's often espoused as an important principle in writing that helps guide your purpose. You are driving towards a destination, as opposed to wandering about. Not every writer follows this, and I was curious where you fell, if only in practice.
Good point. You know, you could also use this as an argument for completing your planning/outlining before you even lay pen to paper. An outline, even a detailed one, is much easier to edit after all, and the more thorough your planning, the less likely (I imagine) it is that changes occur during writing instead of during planning. But here's the counterpoint:
So, hmm. Do you know the reasons for the mismatch? Like lengthy time periods between outlining and writing, outlines being very general and thus inviting changes during writing, or perhaps it's just that when getting down to the nitty gritty level of scenes new ideas propose themselves?
4132846
A little of everything. The most common one, especially for the endings, is that the original idea ends up seeming cliche or poorly thought out-- my favorite example of this is Best Young Flyer, which was supposed to be about Scoot learning she's good enough to date Dash. I got two chapters in, and realized that even though it was the only aged-up ScootaDash fic on the site, it felt cliche, like it should have been done a million times before. So I changed it to be about Scoot learning that Dash is a really flawed pony, and being willing to take a risk on that. That took scrapping a lot of what I had written and changing everything past the point I had published, but it was worth it.
For other scenes, the most common is that I found that I could accomplish the same thing in a more interesting way, often by combining it with another scene to have more going on. Other times I've had the opposite problem and had to split or add scenes to make sure everything is covered, because what I wanted to accomplish didn't flow naturally where it was supposed to. Or I add or cut because the pacing of the story was off, or in the writing I get hit with plot holes or fridge logic, or I realize the characters would act a different way.
My outlines are usually pretty detailed, I think I just never stop looking at the story on every level: just having an outline doesn't mean the story is "figured out," and the more I think the more likely it is that I'll see something that I could or should do differently. I think it's a feature, not a bug.
4132869
I agree. Thinking about it, I believe the reason I've never really experienced this is because most all of what I've written was for the Writeoff, where there is very little time between outline and writing, and precious less to really rethink things once they've been thought. That and...I've hardly finished anything :P Not to mention they were short stories, nothing multi-chapter.