Write Stuff Down

Some people that I admire love to outline and world-build.  They'll break a novel down into component pieces, working each scene out ahead of time, building the story bit by bit until the finished work just sort of falls into their hands.

Okay, so it's probably never quite that easy.  Some methods make themselves out to be--the Snowflake Method, for one, claims you can almost write a novel by accident, just by building out from the central concept or "elevator pitch."  The concept is that you just bolt on more and more material, taking the sentence to a paragraph, the paragraph to a page, but instead of doing that in the normal linear fashion--starting at the beginning and bolting on sentences until you get to the end--you build the story out from its core.  So by the third or fourth pass through, you've essentially written a beginning, middle, and end.  From there, so they say, you just flesh it out.

And, like almost all writing advice ever spewed forth, this works for someone.  Maybe even more than one person, maybe a whole lot.

I'm just pretty sure it doesn't work for me.  Virtually none of these things do, since they require you to write down things that are within the narrative flow, things that, for me, arise organically in the writing process.  More to the point, it doesn't work since, when I write things down, I tend to forget them.

Someday, I might have to develop another writing process--and I think I might, since the way I do things right now is rather slow and dependent on letting my subconscious grind away at a problem for a while until it pops out the answer into the conscious fore.  But, that has been my process for a while now--I keep mulling over scenes and settings and characters, building plot elements over a long period of time.  The novel I'm writing now has been germinating for five years, at least, and survived two failed attempts to start it, including a stalled outlining.  And, that does make this one challenging since it's a mystery, and mysteries to some degree require rather tight plotting in order to get all the elements in from the beginning.  Extensive revisions may well by my friend on this one.

Another novel, one I wrote in 2008, got its start in scenes I thought of in 1999--and these were fantasy elements at a time when I didn't want to write fantasy, when I was neck-deep in science fiction and didn't think I'd ever tell all the stories I had to tell in that futuristic setting.  And almost all of the development of those ideas occurred in my head, only meeting paper when it came time to actually write the darn thing.  Most of the ideas I have that I write down, or try to outline, end up dying on me.  If I don't take them back into my head, they'll languish there on paper or in dusty computer files, until I happen upon them again--at which point they'll be rather surprising, vaguely familiar and, sometimes, kind of stale.

That being said, I'm also coming around to the idea that every story, every novel, may have its own unique method, that what worked for this won't work for that.  But maybe I'll explore that next time.

Dave