Greetings & Mini-Retrospective · 10:11am Sep 1st, 2019
So I woke up this morning with a frightening sense of duty and responsibility. I think it might have something to do with that follower count of mine having increased from 0 to a number that isn't 0. In a word, eek.
Hearty thank yous are in order first and foremost. I really appreciate that my story appealed enough to you to warrant following me, and know that I will do my best to justify your decision-making. Secondly, I suppose I best do something to make the decision worthwhile whilst I'm writing more material. Soooo blog I guess... Yay?
Yay.
So anyway, a small snippet about me before I get into the hopefully more interesting subject of what I learned from writing Treasure. I'm a writer living in the rural south-west England, and I'm currently flitting around the MLP fandom for the second time (I had previously been around between seasons four and six), as well as playing around with some fanfiction for other franchises. I also write original fiction as well, and have had some short stories published here and there. At the moment I'm researching for what would be my first novel.
I've had something of an interesting few months writing-wise, which culminated in the creation of Treasure and a period of mostly-positive self-reflection afterwards. You see, I had developed a strange and not particularly (in hindsight) way of writing. Now the often polarising debate between being a planner and a spontaneous writer is fairly common, so I have no real interest in expanding on it here. The main point of it that relates to this blog is that I have always been a planner. I use spreadsheets and matrices and timelines, and I write biographies and small encyclopedias. However, I found myself rapidly getting to stage where the writing part had become uninteresting and (gasp!) not particularly enjoyable. And on reflection I think some of this has been down to allowing the planning part of my nature to incubate my fear and anxiety of actually bringing the damn thing to life.
To put into context, my writing process had become an extension of that research and planning stage. My first three or four drafts would not be drafts so much as sketched foundations that increasingly had more and more information and dialogue placed on top of it so that it wore the disguise of a story by the later stages of the writing process. For the most part it wore its disguise well; I had compliments as well as critiques, but the main issue was always about the diminishing levels of enjoyment each story gave me, and this grew and grew until I was barely about to finish a story. It also took bloody ages.
This also seemed to affect another part of my approach to writing process: for a long time now I have been unable to write early drafts directly onto my laptop or notebook. I have been convinced this because my chosen approach to build a story up through stages lends itself well to making sketches of scenes in whatever order they arrive in, to make visual maps of paragraphs and conversations and what-have-you. And I think that would be fine if it didn't also feel as though I was doing this to hide from the writing process. I have been wondering for a while whether all of this isn't just some deep-set procrastination or safety net, keeping the actual act of writing at arm's length and stopping me putting more of myself into the process.
So for Treasure I simply didn't. I listed several three-to-five word scenes as a structure, and simply got on with the act of writing. I knew what I wanted the story to say, mostly, but I was also happy to let the writing dictate to me direction changes and tangents. I just sat in front of my laptop and I wrote.
And it was painful. It was scary. It was also enjoyable.
It's probably the first time in a long time that I've actually enjoyed writing something, that I haven't felt like a fraud, all emotionally distant from the material. I cared about the characters, and I cared about the world feeling alive and real. I also enjoyed the realisation that I can actually alter and amend the story whilst writing in this way, that I didn't have to have it all planned out. Originally the scene was going to be much shorter, focusing solely on Smolder's attempts to soar above the planet. But it didn't quite have the emotional heft I wanted from the piece, and it felt as though Smolder's motivation was lacking. Ocellus brought a lot of that to the fore, though even she was originally going to be more conflicted. I had toyed with the idea of having her actually aware of Smolder's feelings, that those feelings were also nourishing her in a way that made it important to keep Smolder's feelings unrequired. But writing the story made me realise that that would have added more reveals and emotional weight than the length of the story could have carried. So out it went.
It was a really enlightening process for me. Now, this isn't a lecture promoting the virtues of not planning, but it is the sharing of a life-lesson that has personally helped me. Reflect on your writing approaches and maybe every now and then push yourself to adopt a different approach. You might surprise yourself, but if you don't then that's fine too.
Anyway, that's probably enough rambling for now. Feel free to stop by and share your own experiences with writing practices, or even just to say hello. It'll be nice to hear from you. Either way, I'll be back in a week or so with my next story.
When I was writing Sibling Rivalry, I thought I had everything planned out. Then I believe I got to chapter 13, and realized I didn't. Where the characters currently were, would not lead them where I wanted them to go. The end result was actually a more interesting story in my view.
But I've heard this sorta sentiment before. A writer who basically writes his books by the seat of his pants, and any problems are dealt with in later edits. He said he once tried to plan a book from beginning to end, and quickly got bored of it. He already knew what was going to happen. What was the point?
I find it hard to not plan a story to a certain extent, even though I do like the seat-of-the-pants style. But that's mainly because of my restless mind. Though I believe I did start writing With Rainbow Hair with only the most basic of concepts before realizing it was all character and world-building with no real plot.
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Yeah, I think there's always going to be a contextual element to one's preferences here. One person is happy to let the characters and the story direct the writing, another needs to feel greater control. I think far too often I read advice that encourages you to identify with one or the other as a necessary step in finding your voice/honing your craft, but it's a spectrum as far as I'm concerned. I definitely lean more towards the planning end; my problem, as much as I was able to diagnose it, was that I was using that planning mentality during the writing stage too. I built the story up rather than getting on with the task of just writing it. For my original fiction project I'm going to try and tether that planning mindset to where it best belongs.