Do you plan before you write? Or discover as you write?
Shelby Foote, an experienced fiction writer, wrote 6 novels before turning to his real meat, history and the Civil War. He took an engineer’s approach to fiction, outlining each chapter meticulously, then expanding the outline and fleshing it out with essential detail. Only then would he “write.” Having finished a chapter, he gave it a light polish for mechanics, then never looked back.
John Irving, by contrast writes every day, with only a loose plan. As the pages pile up, key details emerge and the story takes shape. By page 150 or so he’s up to full speed.
For years, “Gone with the Wind” was an ungainly stack of manilla envelopes in Margaret Mitchell’s study. Each one contained a chapter in whatever stage of development it happened to exist. Every so often, she would pull one at random from the stack and revise. Then she returned it to the stack and pulled out another one. This went on for years.
I lean toward something in between the Mitchell and Irving methods. In the early stages, I try to know my story. For me, writing is thinking. I have a rough plan, but instead of working on a chapter-by-chapter outline, revising, re-revising, embellishing, and enriching it, I shift methods and plunge into the writing. I have to or I go nowhere.
How do you begin a story or novel? What’s your method?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I used to write a chapter at a time and then go back and revise and revise and revise, then I would move on to the next chapter. I think it was Bill who said that was a form of procrastination. If I’m honest, he’s right. It takes an incredibly long time to finish when you spend a month or so on 15 or so pages.
But, prior to Bill making that comment, I had a deadline for a competition. I decided to finish a project I had been working on in the fashion as I described above and I sat down and finished…never looking back at a single word. It was hard! But, it taught me that if you want to finish a project, you actually have to go at it with the mentality of finishing it. Then, I went back and edited and continue to edit. I find the more organized approach of note cards, etc. more helpful on the editing side.
I even took a break from the editing and wrote a 220 page young adult novel for my son, and never stopped to look back and finished it in a matter of about 6 weeks. Again, I have a great deal of editing to do, but I was truly amazed at how the story eveolved and emerged. That being said, this particular story is about my son and his late grandfather — so I had very little character development (which I think makes it easier to get the novel out). In the editing phase I will have character issues to address.
My preference very much depends on what kind of work I’m writing. When I do short stories, I usually have a jumping-off place and then I just roll, cranking out words for two or three or maybe four hours until it’s done. For book-length works, my style’s changing like yours, Anne. I’ve been writing fast for a couple years now, but what I used to do is write a chapter or two or whatever I could finish that day, then either the next day or the next week (whenever I got back to it) I would reread the most recent chapter to get back in the mindset (while making minor corrections) and then move on to the next chapter. Sometimes I would decide I didn’t like the story’s direction, so I would delete a chapter or two or three and then pick up from wherever I felt the action was still fresh and interesting.
Right now, the NaNoWriMo style has me pumping out a rough draft that’s incredibly strange – I can’t live with the message that’s coming out, but I can resist the thoughts that are appearing. I like this method better, pumping out as many words as possible as fast as possible without looking back. The characters have far more control now than they’ve ever had before in my works and the story is far more linear (in it’s own way) than previous novel manuscripts I’ve tried. The only downside I’ve had is that I’ve twice written an ending but had to keep going for the sake of word count. I didn’t delete either ending – I’ve just rolled with the surprises, and the story has created even more fun as a result. I don’t know yet how much editing I will need to do (the few sections I’ve read aloud, it felt like there were a lot of paragraphs I could cut), but I think the story framework is much stronger than it would have been had I tried to edit as I go.