I Don’t Care How You Do It…

 

Just do it well. Do it vigorously. MEAN it when you do it.

In case you’re getting the wrong idea or thinking that perhaps I’m stuck in the subject of two-weeks past, this week here at the word-whores we are telling you how we write, specifically if we are a plotter or a “write-by-the-seat-of-your-pants”-er. I, Linda, your hump-day word-whore am neither…and yet both.

You see, I have a large story arc for my series—an arc that would cover at least nine books. But that arc is simply a general summary of what happens in each book. The main plot thread. The subplots, the trials of the minor characters, the details that crop up and the actual way that the goal will be accomplished, all of that I figure it out as I go.        

To me, being shackled to a precisely organized outline is too rigid to allow the muse to function. I dare not take that risk because when the creative lady is dripping ideas onto my head like a cool anointing it’s very, very good. However, I need to know where I’m going. Writing without any clear notion of where these characters must arrive allows that same muse to pour buckets on my noggin and then me and the story are drowning in a blurry, unfocused mess. Stringing together random ideas does not a novel make—not one that readers would enjoy anyway.

For whatever reason, writers write. We tell out stories, putting them lovingly on the page…but it is in publishing them and sharing them en mass that is the goal of our hearts. Consider this:

In THE OXFORD BOOK OF AMERICAN ESSAYS (1914) Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) said:

When we American writers find grace to do our best, it is not so much because we are sustained by each other, as that we are conscious of a deep popular heart, slowly but surely answering back to ours, and offering a worthier stimulus than the applause of a coterie. If we once lose faith in our audience, the muse grows silent. Even the apparent indifference of this audience to culture and high finish may be in the end a wholesome influence, recalling us to those more important things, compared to which these are secondary qualities. The indifference is only comparative; our public prefers good writing, as it prefers good elocution; but it values energy, heartiness, and action more. The public is right; it is the business of the writer, as of the speaker, to perfect the finer graces without sacrificing things more vital. “She was not a good singer,” says some novelist of his heroine, “but she sang with an inspiration such as good singers rarely indulge in.” Given those positive qualities, and I think that a fine execution does not hinder acceptance in America, but rather aids it. Where there is beauty of execution alone, a popular audiénce, even in America, very easily goes to sleep. And in such matters, as the French actor, Samson, said to the young dramatist, “sleep is an opinion.”

{Matthews, Brander, ed. (1852–1929).  Americanism in Literature }    

So, in effort to keep from writing stuff that would bore people, I make bullet points in the document. I start with maybe ten or twelve. And I write. As the plot progresses, I add bullet points and time notations and moon phase notes according to the calendar I’m keeping with the story. I sit back and think the next logical step through and find a way to accomplish it that is interesting and—hopefully—not what one might expect. As I write the scenes, I remove the “done” bullet points. This is more fluid “combined” method evolves as the story evolves. It has the best qualities of both approaches, it gives me direction, yet it feels free. Writing a novel I’d say is never easy, but it’s always worth the effort.