This was originally going to be a comment in Lynn's blog, but it got way out of hand so it's going here (context: she asked about writing process).
My first thought is to type, "I haven't quite nailed a process yet," but I have a feeling that as I type about what I do, a fairly standard process may emerge.
I have a lot of stuff sitting on my hard drive. I don't consider most of it "Finished," but I do write a lot of short fiction, so I've had many opportunities to finish a draft and revise.
My ideas usually come in the form of "a story about a person who _____." The first thing I have to do with the idea is define the world that "a person" lives in. If my idea is "real world" (i.e. a college kid who is struggling with faith), this step is pretty easy (he's at college!). When things run fantasy or sci-fi, this takes longer because I have to basically write a world history, create magical laws, and try and get into the heads of civilizations that thrived and died long before the story takes place. If this weren't insanely fun, I would probably never write fantasy :)
This is a time-consuming process because I'm basically writing a story to help me write a story (in fact, the first time I tried this, the back story became the story, so I had to write even more back story!), so I find it's best to paint with broad strokes and fill in the details as necessary. I'll catch the inconsistencies in revision (I hope).
The reason I'm so thorough is because I want to be in control of any cultural factors that would influence my characters' personalities. I would rather have something de-rail my story at this stage than when I'm attached to where I think things are going.
Once I have a world put together, I drop my characters in there and see what happens. Sometimes I start by writing up character sheets (one time, just for kicks, I actually rolled the characters D&D style), but I've found that it's easier to write those after I've had a chance to work with the characters. Every interaction reveals something about a person's personality and reflects their past, so I like to let the character sheets grow with the story before I set them in stone.
I don't really plot. I mean, right now I've got three vaguely-defined events that I think need to happen, but they're open enough that I'm not locked into a specific course of action. I keep a file called "The Next Step," which really only gets used when I'm stuck in a "boring" scene and don't want to lose my direction, but it doesn't go very far. I've found that saying, "they'll kill this guy when they run into him next" doesn't mean my characters will actually kill that guy when they run into him next -- they're much more complex than I can sum up in a plot outline, so I try not to do that when I can help it.
I've only "finished" a longer story once -- it's my current WIP for Sven, and it marginally resembles the first draft and promises to be much longer. Part of my process was seeing how bad that initial draft was and revamping everything -- story, characters, world, all of it.
Sorry if this is kind of rambly. I'm at work, so I'm writing a few sentences at a time as I get stuff done :)
5 comments:
Very interesting! Thanks for thinking about it and writing a post. It's always good to know how others work, and I think your process will define itself over time. I even think it can change from book to book, but I think the basic process you are most comfortable with is the one that will form the base. :)
Just strolling by to say thanks for visiting my blog. Enjoyed reading about your process. So, would you say then that your stories are character driven? Go Sven!
I was just sitting down to work on some writing ideas and feeling like I needed some sort of method of mapping things out a bit and organizing my thoughts. And I said to myself "hey I wonder if matt has any thoughts on writing process on his blog"
And you actually do. Awesome.
I aim to please :)
"This is a time-consuming process because I'm basically writing a story to help me write a story (in fact, the first time I tried this, the back story became the story, so I had to write even more back story!)"
OMG! Me, too. My first fantasy novel ever came into being because I working on the backstory for the novel that I never ended up writing. Not that I don't intend to write that original idea, I do. It just hasn't happened yet.
I'm so glad I'm not the only one ot fall prey to this. :-)
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