I've been working on a talk for Toastmasters about writing for two months. I was struggling to boil it down to 5-7 minutes altogether, I'm finding TM is all about the concision, which is a very good thing for me to learn. One of things that I wanted to address was about different writing styles. I ended up condensing from this, but I don't happen to have that version here at home. Here's the more expansive version... I find there are writing issues that no beta-reader in the world can help you with. Writing methods are all different. Many writers can only tell you how their own style works and don’t understand at all how the others work. In a forum like this, it’s easy to claim that you’re organized, that you outline everything first, then you go out after your facts, and then you drape the characters on the frame like a tailor-made coat. Well, some people really do it that way. They have different problems than I do. I don’t have nice tidy characters like that. I’m always running along after them, like a reporter with a bad tape recorder, shouting things like, “But that’s not what you said last time!” They have tendency to say snarky things like, “And you believed me?” As with glimpsed movie images, I see little scenes, bits and pieces, that assemble themselves into a natural order. Let’s say that I’ve got this scrap of a dramatic sequence with an explosion. When I see a lot of people talking in front of an intact building, clearly the bomb hasn’t happened yet. And there’ll be other little hints and clues hanging out of the scene, if it’s carefully observed. Then you keep watching for the matching bits, as if you’re looking at assembly directions written in badly-translated English. Or trying to match up puzzle bits.
The odd part is that I found out this piecemeal subconscious construction actually hangs together. Mostly. Sometimes tab A doesn’t fit very well into slot B.
I’d never read about anything like my own method until I saw Stephen King’s book on writing. He described that it felt like archeology to him. He was digging out something that was already there. It was his job to figure out what it was, a short story or a novel. Was he digging up a dainty little Archeopteryx dinosaur with feather imprints, or did he need to get out the big hydraulic shovel for the hadrosaur bones?
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branchandroot
I'm the scene-first plot-later type
Date: 2005-06-13 01:52 am (UTC)I ended up condensing from this, but I don't happen to have that version here at home. Here's the more expansive version...
I find there are writing issues that no beta-reader in the world can help you with. Writing methods are all different. Many writers can only tell you how their own style works and don’t understand at all how the others work. In a forum like this, it’s easy to claim that you’re organized, that you outline everything first, then you go out after your facts, and then you drape the characters on the frame like a tailor-made coat. Well, some people really do it that way. They have different problems than I do.
I don’t have nice tidy characters like that.
I’m always running along after them, like a reporter with a bad tape recorder, shouting things like, “But that’s not what you said last time!”
They have tendency to say snarky things like, “And you believed me?”
As with glimpsed movie images, I see little scenes, bits and pieces, that assemble themselves into a natural order. Let’s say that I’ve got this scrap of a dramatic sequence with an explosion. When I see a lot of people talking in front of an intact building, clearly the bomb hasn’t happened yet. And there’ll be other little hints and clues hanging out of the scene, if it’s carefully observed. Then you keep watching for the matching bits, as if you’re looking at assembly directions written in badly-translated English. Or trying to match up puzzle bits.
The odd part is that I found out this piecemeal subconscious construction actually hangs together. Mostly. Sometimes tab A doesn’t fit very well into slot B.
I’d never read about anything like my own method until I saw Stephen King’s book on writing. He described that it felt like archeology to him. He was digging out something that was already there. It was his job to figure out what it was, a short story or a novel. Was he digging up a dainty little Archeopteryx dinosaur with feather imprints, or did he need to get out the big hydraulic shovel for the hadrosaur bones?