Getting Started—M.G. Sondraal

 You’re an avid reader and have read innumerable books. You love a good story and are incensed by a poor one and can distinguish one from the other. Even if you don’t like the plot or the resolution or the genre, you know what’s well-written and what isn’t. Surely you can write a book. It can’t be that hard.

Isn’t that what we’ve all thought, especially after wasting time and money on a sloppily written disappointment? I know I’ve often wondered how a particular novel was chosen to be published, especially when good writers I know have not had their works snapped up by a major publisher to enjoy weeks on the bestseller list.

I still don’t know the answers to how some works are picked up and others passed over, but I do know writing isn’t easy. Appreciating and creating are entirely different processes and I naively over-estimated the intersection of the two.

The process of writing is as varied as there are writers. Different strategies work depending on a host of reasons.

I think everyone agrees that a daily writing practice is essential. Waiting for your muse is just an exercise in procrastination, and we all have enough of those anyway. You must write so you can edit and polish and submit. Otherwise, you’re just wasting time.

Find a comfortable, distraction-free zone and a time that’s best for you and force yourself to write something every day. Some people write to a playlist and change it for each project. Others need silence. There are early birds, night owls; daily jobs and family responsibilities; just make it work for you.

Some writers work towards a set word count and won’t let themselves stop until it’s reached. This is effective when doing NaNoWriMo when you have an artificial word count target to achieve in 30 days and you know that first re-write will be a doozy. Personally, I don’t like the tyranny of targets. NaNoWriMo has been very helpful for me to break the obsessive need to edit and re-edit and never get beyond the first page or the first chapter. Some writers work like that, polishing every sentence in turn before going on. For me, getting the story arc out in some fashion and, after a period of rumination, going back and doing that first structural edit is more productive.

And then we come to plotters and pants-ers.

Plotters are meticulous in the planning of the work. They know where the story begins and ends and every step in-between. They do the appropriate, proactive research so they don’t get stalled mid-way not knowing some small but vital piece of knowledge that halts the forward momentum.

Pants-ers write by the seat of their pants, hence the name, without that defined story outline to guide them, ideas bouncing around like the balls in a pinball game, taking them to explore innumerable “what if” scenarios while writing. Often it leads the dreaded “now what” question because their characters are stuck with no feasible way of extricating themselves.

I don’t think these are two solitudes but rather a continuum linking both. Each writer finds a place somewhere along the spectrum and settles in. I’m more of a plotter, but I don’t plan every scene and chapter, nor do I put the story on spreadsheets or index cards, all colour-coded for character, before I start, (though it can be helpful in the structural editing of a piece). To me, the story becomes more cookie-cutter if I’m constrained by that process and editing after will tighten up the pacing if necessary.

That’s not to say I sit down at a blank screen and begin writing with only a germ of an idea of what my story is about and no clue where it will end. I don’t understand how the more free-wheeling among us can do that. Without direction, for me there are too many dead-ends and inexplicable problems or inadvertent omissions of necessary information that some minimal pre-planning would eliminate. I’m lazy by nature, so I don’t like to do a lot of extra work that will never be included in the final product.

I typically spend a lot of time thinking about the storyline, working out the major plot points to anchor the tale, and determining the backstories for all my major characters so I know how each will react in any situation. Only when it’s all worked out in my head, do I begin the effort of writing. I will ask myself “what if” questions to help enrich the story but not to change the outcome. The only time I hadn’t clearly identified in my own mind who was the villain of three potentials, I ended up choosing rashly so the book could end. I didn’t like the novel and thought the ending unsatisfying. I mulled it over for an entire year before I finally had an epiphany…and had to do a major re-write. That was my first, and last, flirtation with pants-ing.

To my fellow DeadLies, I ask—where are you on the spectrum?

M.G.Sondraal