What is your process?

Discussion in 'Plot Development' started by LucyAshworth, Nov 15, 2020.

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  1. ruskaya

    ruskaya Contributor Contributor

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    This makes a lot of sense. I feel the same, although my rate of production seems a lot slower than yours.
    It seems to me that one starts from the things one knows, so emulating patterns and content one has already read somewhere, which is a more than valid way to practice to make it one's own while learning what makes a story work and good writing. Lacking experience, one first has to purge out all those writings that one stores as templates to be able to move on creating more original stuff (truer to one's style).

    PS: I feel like I just wrote a very convoluted post.
     
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  2. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    I feel like I was lucky that I started writing very young, so it accompanied me as I learned and developed toward adulthood. That way you feel no pressure in the early stories to do anything other than have fun and entertain yourself. As a child you don't have that critical facility yet, that makes an adult feel like they need to learn to 'do it right'. It was just a way of creating fun ideas straight from the imagination. The fun factor also made it easy to keep going, I never critiqued my own work until I was somewhere around high school age.

    I suspect people beginning in or near adulthood have a lot more to contend with, and will find it a lot harder to crank out those early pieces, unless they can approach it like a child, just for fun. If I had been all critical I never would have written anywhere near as much as I did in those early days.

    My point is not 'give it up if you didn't start writing young', but 'approach it like a child, don't criticize too much—just write in a way that feels natural and have fun with it. And write a lot of little things.'
     
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  3. Vince Higgins

    Vince Higgins Curmudgeon. Contributor

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    There is a saying, "write what you know." A lot of what I write is opinion, and not really intended for publication. I do it for the cathartic value. The upside is that by doing that, I have become a more fluent writer. I now have three unfinished novels. All have as "writing prompts," my life experience. I am a news junkie, and at sixty five years old, have developed the critical thinking skills to distinguish between fake, and spin-and it all has spin.

    As far as actual process, I get up in the morning, take a magic chocolate (10mg does it) watch some news until it takes affect, then go for a long walk. By the time I've gone a mile, my mind is racing with random thoughts. Well, there is that whole sort term memory thing, so to keep those thoughts from flying into the ether, I have a Dictaphone app on my phone. I am one of those that is wearded out by listening to recordings of their own voice, but I push through it, unless I happened to remember it, which sometimes happens, especially for the real gems.

    Just had one of those gems as I write this, watching news. Bye. Going off to write it down.
     
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  4. ruskaya

    ruskaya Contributor Contributor

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    I started early but lost my way. I have issues with generating plots, I see a novel as well-defined snippets of a larger story but when time comes to put it all together it becomes difficult to write. When I was a child, I got bored because I had no idea of why I was writing, so I had no real direction. And because I have issues generating plots, it became boring. I am horrified at writing this now. But I also lament, perhaps unfairly, that school (or any adult, really) wasn't able to equip me with the tools to move in that direction (of writing). When I say school, I refer to any grade all the way to include university. There is too much the sense that writing should be completely natural, either you can or can't. While it takes time to even master plot.



    I weave my personal experience into my writing because that way I can add more depth that if I were to make it up from scratch. Of course reading helps a lot in thinking and understanding deeper levels of human emotions and dynamics as well. But I heard a variety of authors that suggest moving into uncharted territory as a way not to limit oneself to one's experience, but allow writing to be a portal into a world one would like to navigate. I like this idea.

    I would like to hear about what makes your writing cathartic, if you don't mind sharing, I am looking to get to do more of that myself. :)
     
  5. Vince Higgins

    Vince Higgins Curmudgeon. Contributor

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    Nixon resigned the summer after I graduated from high school. My writing is informed by world events. I have always paid attention to them, and was fortunate enough to have come of age at a time when the distinction between real and fake news was clearer than it is today. The moon landing was just five years in the past, and almost no one denied it really happened. Pay attention to the world around you. Question everything. Talk to yourself, and take notes. Be willing to accept that something you may have thought was true is actually wrong.

    Frank Herbert's Dune was inspired by many things, particularly the situation arising from European colonialism in the middle east. (Spice is oil) Many of my favorite writers injected their personal experiences, within the context of the larger world. Steinbeck wrote of people on the margins of a great economic collapse. My novel deals with growing up in late twentieth century suburbia, as an ethnic minority.

    Catharsis comes from my own struggles with mental illness. Therapy shrinks have had mixed results. I have countless thousands of words of pouring out thoughts of what bugs me, most of which are never intended for publication. It helps me "get though this thing, what ever it is." (quote from Kurt Vonnegut. Have you ever read him?)
     
  6. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    Oh, I never worried about things like plot or structure, not until much later. My writing has always been pretty free-form, and I wasn't concerned about that. But I also never tried to write for publication, just kept having fun with it.

    I suppose the important thing is that I was always enjoying the journey, and was never really focused on the end point of being a professional.

    As soon as I did start to think about it that way I lost a lot of my impetus and joy. In fact the same is true in drawing and painting—sometimes I get caught up in nothing but exercises and practice rather than having fun, and at those times I lose my desire to do it anymore. I think, even when you're trying to develop those skills, you also need to keep doing small pieces just for fun and however you want to work, no thought for structure and form.

    EDIT—It ties in with this:
    You don't want to write from a focus of pure rationality, it must come at least partially from intuition and feeling. What you want to do is learn the skills, practice them over and over until they get absorbed into the unconscious, then you'll be able to work naturally without thinking much about structure etc, and it will still be there.

    This is how you learned to walk, talk, and read, and lots of other things. If you try to do those things consciously, planning each step and thinking about how you're swinging your arms etc, you'll stumble all over the place—there won't be any grace to it. But once you've got it firmly embedded into the unconscious (subconscious, whatever) it becomes graceful and effortless, and then you only need to think about where you want to go, the body does the rest automatically.
     
    Last edited: Nov 20, 2020
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  7. ruskaya

    ruskaya Contributor Contributor

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    I agree, it is necessary first to absorb writing into the unconscious, which can be achieved by means of practice and trials. I had the same feeling as a child that writing was a free form like going on its own. Now I desperately need structure or I get lost. But even as a child at some point writing felt pointless without a direction and I was too young to know what giving it "direction" implied. It is not necessarily a goal, but I now consider feeling emotionally attached to my writing, a bond I create through the act of writing, a must to have motivation to continue. It is more a personal thing, I define meaning in my life as building connection. That is just me. At the same time, having a publication goal helps keep myself in track and work a novel as it should be, in the final form of a novel, and not a sequence of scene that are related but not moving from one to the other. Having to figure out how the publishing world works and researching it, although publication is still far away, charges me to sit down and write. I find that useful, because there are periods when writing doesn't quite come to me but I still need to be focused on it to be able to advance a novel/story.
     
  8. Talako

    Talako Member

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    You can plan and outline can all you want, but once you start actual writing, you will find that characters and story will wander off course all on their own. All that planning wasted when a simple arrow of direction could have sufficed.

    Always planning and never writing suggests fear.
     
  9. Rewrite The Ending

    Rewrite The Ending Member

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    Why would you say that it suggests fear? Fear to fail? A perfectionism?

    I have been in a similar situation, always planning and hardly ever or never writing. I have themes I would like to write about, work on my characters, but I don't really have a plot idea. Without a plot, there is no story. I hope to create plots through my characters and the themes. But yeah, I end up with not writing, maybe the planning may seem useless but I think it is a part of the creative process. I also get the idea though that all the planning means nothing if you don't write, and the planning for me is going slow and I am still not done yet, Maybe I am afraid of writing something that is terrible, to find out I have no talent for writing at all so I have no goal to focus on and then I must find a new goal. Planning keeps me going I think, when the actual writing part seems too uncertain. It can be easier to write when you know what you are writing though it does not always help, but it gives you a more clear direction. Like I said, maybe I do not want to find out that I suck with writing.
     
  10. montecarlo

    montecarlo Contributor Contributor

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    @Rewrite The Ending

    You don't need a plot to start telling a story. You just need a seed. I learned this reading Stephen King's On Writing. He said Misery, like a lot of his books, just started with a scenario. He thought, hey would if a famous author was trapped with a psychotic fan? And with that, he just got writing, and it turned into a story.

    I recently wrote a short story starting with nothing more than this: a young woman is trapped on a spaceship with a serial killer. That's it. No plot, not the foggiest notion of who these people were. I just came up with an image for an opening scene, putting these two belligerents in conflict, and dutifully recorded what they did to advance their agenda. I stopped recording 10,000 words later when one combatant was victorious and the other defeated.

    - MC
     
  11. Rewrite The Ending

    Rewrite The Ending Member

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    I suppose you can make a story without having a plot. But at some point I think, there has to be some plot , a story you are telling?
     
  12. montecarlo

    montecarlo Contributor Contributor

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    I said start without a plot. Of course there is a plot by the end.

    -MC
     

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