Working on something longer that isn't quite finished, but I'd like to post something that I just whipped up about the evolution of my writing process.
I’ve been working
on various writing projects for a while, and I’ve finally come up
with a writing process that works for me. This is actually something
that I discovered completely by accident when I was in Vancouver for
a week in June, back in 2016. This was the slightly strange start of
an adventure in Indonesia that included climbing a 2900 meter
volcano, nearly being washed out to sea in a rainforest, nearly being
washed out to sea in a hotel in a beach resort town in Western Java,
and
nearly being put on dialysis after I contracted leptospirosis and my
kidneys started shutting down. The night before I flew out to
Vancouver, I had a very strange, very vivid dream. The visual details
aren’t important, but as soon as I woke up on my friend Marc’s
couch I knew that I had to write down the details of this dream
before it was lost in the rush of traveling. I’d left my laptop and
nearly all my possessions in storage in Santa Clara, and typing in
several thousand words on a smartphone had no great appeal to me.
Fortunately, I did have a cheap cardboard notebook and a few pens, as
I wanted to keep a travelogue in Indonesia. After I’d gotten on the
plane in San Francisco, I started jotting down notes and extraneous
details, making sure I got the bones of the dream before I started
transcribing it in anything approaching a coherent manner. As this
happened, the dream sequence shifted subtly from being just a vivid
scene into being the beginning of a story, one that I quickly
outlined in broad strokes. After that, the whole sequence just flowed
from my brain through my fingers and onto the page. I only stopped
when I had to get off the plane, and started up again while I was
waiting in YVR airport for the customs and immigration people to
process me. I managed to keep up the flow for several hours and took
down thirty five (pocket sized, to be fair) pages before the flow ran
out. During the rest of my trip I would occasionally reread what I
had written, and I was a little shocked. The scenes in my notebook
had action and direction, the characters in it were vivid and three
dimensional. This was a little unnerving. My previous attempts at
storytelling had been less successful. I had previously
had to force myself to turn keypresses into story content, and I had
had to rewrite and revise multiple times before I was left with
anything good. After some pondering I came up with some plausible
reasons why my hastily scribbled dream transcriptions had come easier
than anything I’d done before.
The most obvious is
the distraction factor of having a computer. The barrier of
distraction is fairly low with a laptop, as it’s almost an
unconscious reflex to be writing and then switch to a browser and
goof around a little. A related distraction is choosing what software
you use. Do you use Word? Notepad? Sticky? Whatever choice you make
affects how easy it is to do revision and segmentation. My primary
set of tools had been emacs, LaTex, and GNU Make. I kid you not: I
would hand code LaTex files in emacs with one chapter per file and
had a makefile that would turn each LaTex file into a standalone pdf
and combine all the chapters into a single pdf for the whole work. I
admit this is kind of cool, and may wind up being helpful if I ever
get the impetus back to work on longer fiction, but the distraction
factor was still high even when I was working on the book proper. I
would be writing about a shootout and then want to compile the
chapter to check on formatting, and I would get annoyed with the
idiosyncrasies of the makefile. “It’s just a few minutes of
fiddling with Make,” I would reason. “I’m just clearing up an
inefficiency in my toolchain. It’ll save time in the long run.”
And then I would spend a happy two hours reading the GNU Make
documentation, or trying to coerce CMake/Ninja into filling my needs,
or running experiments to figure out how to make ellipses in LaTex,
or adding lines and packages to my dot emacs, or whatever, and I
would get no actual writing done.
After I had drifted
on to other projects, I eventually came to a realization. Dicking
around with tools is just that: dicking around with tools. In the
short term, and definitely until I can write with any kind of quality
and discipline and consistency, it is more important to get my words
onto a non-volatile medium of some kind than it is to have an
infrastructure for that medium. This is the same issue that people
starting new software projects occasionally have. They start dicking
around with the build system, or with the toolchain, or with
frameworks, or with containers, or whatever, and they never actually
wind up writing any software. I still plan on using my (rather
clever, I must admit) LaTex/makefile setup when I return to longer
fiction, but only after I’ve done a first draft for each chapter
with a pen and paper.
There’s something
about the physical act of writing that is enormously conducive to the
creative humors. This isn’t really surprising, as many people like
to doodle or fiddle with their hands while they think. It’s not
really any slower, for me at least, as the speed that I lose by using
a pen and paper instead of typing is more than made up for by the
increased idea flux. I can write for longer and have better and more
ideas when I’m in a pen and paper groove. Having a physical piece
of paper on which I must place words encourages me to get something
out and not futz with it forever. I can cross out something that
doesn’t work, but it’s harder to do endless rewrites of the same
phrase. Transcribing from paper to keyboard also gives my writing two
passes through my creative pipeline. I can do better live editing
when I’m transcribing from a notebook than if I’m trying to fix
something that’s already been typed up.
Several years ago,
I stumbled across Heinlein’s rules of writing on Robert J. Sawyer’s
blog. I’ve never found out where they originally came from (clearly
Heinlein, but I mean whether a lecture or an essay or something else)
but given that he won four live and five posthumous Hugos for best
novel, he was clearly qualified to posit some rules about writing,
and the origin of these rules is merely an academic curiosity. The
point being, Heinlein’s first rule of writing is that you must
write.
To
that end, any part of your writing process that assists your writing
is beneficial, and anything that slows or distracts your writing is
detrimental. I
don’t intend to write for a living, but
there are stories that I want to tell, and a creative muscle that I
want to flex. Anything that helps with those goals is worth
pursuing.
