pjthompson | Entries tagged with organic writing

Random quote of the day:

“That Bible salesman character [Flannery O’Connor] had created from the whole cloth of her imagination had broken free from her control and did exactly what the story demanded he do. That’s a magic moment in fiction, I tell my students. Trust the accidents, I tell them. A story is a story is a story. Only the story counts, I tell my students.”

—Chuck Kinder, Last Mountain Dancer

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Desus and Mero, Beyoncé, or the Marine Corps Marching Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“The true artist will write in, as it were, small leaps, on a hundred subjects that surge unawares into his mind. In this way, nothing is forced. Everything has an unwilled, natural charm. One does not provoke: one waits.”

—Jules Renard, Journal, September 1887 (ed. & tr. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget)

I managed 1402 words last week. Not an impressive total, but there was an insurrection so I'm giving myself a pat on the back anyway.

This fantasy novel involves Nazis—the WWII kind—and I can't decide if it's perfect timing or perfectly bad timing. At any rate, it will take me a long time to finish it and by then we will certainly know more about the progress of Nazism in America and whether or not we survive it.

But I'd be lying if I didn't say my own manuscript is giving me the squicks right now. I'd work on something else but this one is doing the talking. Insistently. I know better than to try to shut up what is wanting its time on the stage. I started the preliminary work on this novel some years ago and there were Nazis in it from early days. I wrote about 27k before it stalled last summer. (I also know better than to force something to talk when it doesn't want to. It means I need to figure stuff out before proceeding.) But it started mumbling again about a month and a half ago and during the Christmas break it started talking very loudly indeed.

I just work here. So I follow where I'm led. I will not, however, say that I am just following orders. I'm "channeling" something—and I don't mean anything booga booga by that. Zeitgeist or shadowlands, I can't say. I suppose it will let me know in its own "sweet" time.

Random quote of the day:

“First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him.”

—Ray Bradbury, Santa Barbara Writers’ Conference speech, 1972

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Laurel and Hardy, Ariana Grande, or the Salvation Army Band. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

In each novel I always seem to reach a place, generally somewhere in the middle, but not always, where I commit an egregious infodump outrage—pages and pages of IN-FOR-MATION. Sometimes, I'll admit, I commit more than one of these. It doesn't do any good for me to try editing it down in the first draft because if I try to limit or edit-as-I-go it stalls the novel. I just have to release that "breath I didn't know I was holding" and get on with it. Let it have its way and worry about fixing it after the first draft is done.

I'm an organic writer and used to writing on the fly, but even so I do a great deal of worldbuilding before I commit to a novel. Mostly the big stuff, but also quite a bit of minutiae. Since I find it impossible to work from an outline, this is my hedge against jumping off the cliff and not being fast enough to "build my wings on the way down." In the day to day of writing, though, "stuff" is going to come up that I haven't sufficiently thought through. It took me awhile to figure out that these infodumps were how my psyche chose to work through things.

My first drafts are always about me telling the story to myself. I am writing with an audience in mind and generally try to do a good, clean job, but ultimately, that first draft is mine—which is one of the reasons outlines don't work. If I've already told myself the story, I feel no drive to tell it again. I need to get caught up in the momentum of finding out and that's part of what propels me forward through the months of completing the draft. I know what happens in the end, but there are all these things in the middle that are surprises. These mysterious pathways remain obscure until I put one foot in front of the other heading for that far off ending, peaking like the pinnacle of a Mayan temple over the top of the rainforest.

So I have to "tell" these pathways to myself, often in painful and unnecessary detail, in order to internalize them like all the other stuff. I no longer sweat the infodumps. If they remain infodumps in the second draft, then it's time to sweat. Time to get out the machete and hack my way through the creeping lianas and strangler figs to that temple in the sky, waiting for me to discover it and liberate it from its jungle covering.

First: critiquers who given honest, constructive criticism are pure gold. I am grateful to have such folks in my writing life.

Yes, that's right, I've started revising something—the novel I finished last fall.

Sometimes being an instinctual writer makes for a painful revision process. A contributing factor: I no longer fix as I go. That means when the inevitable revision (or revisions) of plot occurs somewhere during the process of writing the first draft, I simply change horses in midstream and push forward. No circling back to make everything conform, no rounding up of stray doggies, or magnanimous rescuing of sodbusters from the evil cattle barons. This was a hard habit to break, but overall I'm glad I did. It means I can push through to the end of the ms. faster, without risk of bogging myself down by obsessing over the details. (Believe me, I've been known to put the ss in obsess and have the rope burns to prove it.)

Now and again, if something really jars my psychic landscape, and if it's necessary for what I anticipate writing up ahead, I will circle back so I can reinhabit a scene. I need a gut feeling for certain things in order to maintain a psychic imprint of the totality of the novel. I always know the endpoint of the story before I start writing, and that's usually the one thing that doesn't change. I aim myself for that ending, kick the sides of my mount, and take off hell bent for leather. But on those occasions when I feel some stranded maiden crying out back down the road apiece, if I really need to know what it feels like to wear her gingham dress, I turn Old Paint and go in for a rescue. I once stopped the forward progress of a novel in order to write a 14k novelette (based on a key scene) from another character's POV. It was essential to get inside that character's head to understand her dynamic on a gut level and how that would play out in her interactions with the hero. I wound up using almost nothing from that 14k, but I don't think I would have finished the novel without it.

Sometimes the emotional consistency of the characters suffer from the push forward, often more than the plot itself. That's not always easy to fix, but my instincts appear to be on the job because just this morning the answer to handling a key problem popped into my brain as I drove to work. There are other issues to solve, some plot, some worldbuilding, some character. I think I see clearly what needs fixing, but you never know about these things. Sometimes as you mosey down the trail, what looks like a stranded maiden from the distance turns out to be Jesse James in drag.

Instincts play a big part in my writing. Generally, if I follow them they lead me to interesting places, making connections between my story and my characters that my conscious mind can't get to. For me, outlining kills this process of discovery. The story stalls because to my instinctual mind it's already been written, so why write it again?

This method isn't without problems. Sometimes it doesn't work at all, other times it only half works: I'll start off with an idea, some characters and setting, and pretty soon I think I know what the story is about and head off down the highway. Inevitably, I hit a pothole—usually a big 'ol pothole that can turn into a sinkhole. I flail around trying to get out of the pit, having a hard time (sometimes) even recognizing where the edges of the pit lie. (Or lay, as the case may be.)

When that happens, I can either keep flailing until something pulls me out, or lay the story aside and wait until my conscious mind catches up with my instinctual mind. At times I need the help of an outside agency. When the problem isn't with my characters or setting, but with the deeper layers of plot—the themes, for instance—I sometimes have to look to research reading to rescue me. I do a certain amount of research reading before I start writing, but only on the ideas that I recognize up front are going to be part of the story. The problem is with all those ideas I didn't realize were there going in.

( Case in point... )

Outlines are good ideas, extremely good. They are far and away the most efficient way to write a story. Unfortunately, they don't work for me. When I write an outline, it kills my stories. I've already figured out what happens, so why repeat it all again? My psyche refuses the jumps when I try to take it around the course.

So for time, when I was trying to figure out my process, I'd get an idea and I'd just sit down and start writing, see where it led me. I wound up having many carcasses of half-finished stories laying around. Clearly, that wasn't working any better than outlining. Trial and error and a million bad words later, I started to get a clearer sense of my own process—and essential part of learning how to write, I think—and figured out that the gold standard for me was knowing the ending.

That may seem obvious, but not all organic writers of my acquaintance need to know the ending in order to produce a finished story. But I do, and it was an important chunk of understanding myself as a writer. Even if the ending changes along the way (which often happens), I have to have an ultimate target to aim towards. But, please! Don't ask me to figure out the middle before I get to it. I'll never get past it to the end if I know too much about how I am going to get there.

My non-organic writing friends, the outliners, get the willies when they hear me talk about how I write. I had one who insisted I needed to outline, although I explained patiently that I'd tried it on many occasions and it wound up killing my stories. "How can you not know where you're going?"

I know where I'm going, I just don't know how I'm getting there. Because it's not just about telling the story for me, it's the adventure of finding the story: into the forest dark and back out again, guided only by the flickering candle of my imagination.

Random quote of the day:

"Like the daimons who inhabit them, myths shape-shift, cutting their cloth to suit the times."

—Patrick Harpur, The Philosopher's Secret Fire

I said to my friend this week, "I'm quitting writing."
She said, "What, again?"

She's right, of course. I'm always quitting. It never sticks. I have no illusion it will stick this time, either. But there's always the possibility it will. Sometimes that panics me. I feel no particular panic right now.

I took the week off because I desperately needed to be doing something besides writing right now. After four days I already thought of a way I wanted to rewrite the ending to Shivery Bones to make it more consistent (and to allow me to steal part of it for the current WIP without having to do a total rethink on that). I'm not exactly yearning towards other ideas, but they're tickling. Late in the transmission of a novel, other ideas always start up with their own bandwagon. It's different this time, only I'm not sure how yet.

The only thing I'm not yearning towards is the current WIP—and I'm so close there, so damned close. It's stalled, and I don't know if it's just because I need a break, if this is another version of late-in-the-manuscript panic, or that I've gone off on a tangent that's leading me astray. Sometimes I stall when the gee-whiz-this-would-be-neato center of my brain takes over and pushes the story off in a new direction. Sometimes this is the correct direction, sometimes it isn't, and sometimes I have to pause until I figure out which. I don't mean figure it out in a brain sense, not think it through logically and plot it out, but figure it out in a gut sense. Let the gut catch up with where I've headed off to, let the gut digest whether this is where I really want to go. Sometimes no left brain analysis is involved whatsoever. All the processes takes place off screen, if you will. One of the perils of organic writing, at least the way I do it, is that there's a lot of gut action involved—and as we all know, sometimes the by-product of guts isn't, um, pleasant.

Or maybe it's a right brain action posing as gut action. This thing that guides my stories feels centered in the gut, but I suspect it's really north of there and hiding down dark alleyways where lurk unsavory characters: cutthroats, thieves, hoors, and other unscrupulous but fascinating types. They are the ones that know how this world works beneath the skin, beneath all the shining bright promises that turn out to be false. Typically, they love doing by subterfuge, pretending to be a gut when they are really denizens of the shadow synapses; the lonely, dark byways where writing hits the road.

It will all work itself out. Or won't. I have passed through this landscape before. I imagine I'll pass through it again. I'm just following the bread crumbs.

93,000 / 100,000
(93.0%)

93,000 / 120,000
(77.5%)

Current Music: Petit Pays - Césaria Évora

So chapter 16 was in the can as of late last week and I'm circling back to chapter 7 to look it over before posting it to the 'shop. And I realize it's been made partially obsolete by the way the story has developed since chapter 7. I'm not talking major rewrite here, but I will have to do a serious rethink. Ninety-five percent of it will work just fine, but the pesky five percent that won't work added nice drama to the chapter. I'll see if I can find something equally dramatic in the next few days that will work.

Such is the fate of an organic life form. Adapt or die.

In other news, I was a complete bum this weekend on the writerly front. I've been going nonstop for weeks now, either writing or critting or talking about writing and I really needed a break. Plus I was exhausted because we've been down two people at work. I did a serious veg thing this weekend, staring at the TV with my mouth open, drooling.

Okay, maybe not that bad. But almost. I even played computer games, which is the ultimate in "turning off the think machine" for me.

It is necessary and desirable to turn off the think machine now and then. Otherwise the smoke starts coming out of my ears.

(Or is that writers' ?)

"Someone says something to someone else, and they talk, and at some point I say, Well, who is this? and I give him a name. But I have no idea what the storyline of the play is. It's a process of discovery."

—August Wilson

If you haven't already, and get a chance to, I recommend you read the Jeffrey Ford interview in the July 2004 issue of Locus. It'll be posted here:

http://www.locusmag.com/2004/Issues/07Ford.html

Shortly, according to the web site.

Jeffrey Ford is a particular favorite of mine, and what I particularly liked about this interview was how hauntingly familiar some of his process is. I'm light years away from being in Mr. Ford's class—quite possibly will never get there—but it's always a comfort when I can look at someone successful and recognize some, or a lot, of my crazy technique in their way of doing things. I guess it means I'm not totally crazy. Or if I am, there are other crazy people out there who've made a go of it.

Other than the egocentric stuff, I also liked what he had to say about genre vs. literary writing. "Works laboring under either of these artificial labels can be great or lousy. Basically, I don't have time for these arguments and I just have to pay attention to the work...."

I've always thought Jeffrey Ford was one of the more literary guys in the field, one of those pushing the boundaries out beyond the ghetto. He says, and I agree, that this is a liberating time for sff. The boundaries are being expanded. Or, at the very least, smudged so that it's difficult to tell where they lie. This is a good thing. This is a healthy thing.

He also makes the point that in the past, phenomenal experience and scientific projection were regarded as part of human experience, something to be included in serious works of literary art. Ask Mary Shelley, ask Shakespeare, Plato, Milton. Realism is a recent development in the history of writing. And I think, whether we are skeptics or believers, we can't deny that aspect of our humanity which exists in dreams, in the subconscious, in the phenomenal world of pure imagination. All of that messy and contradictory and emotional stuff makes us human. They're part of our animal natures, sure, filtered through the layers of our brain from the reptilian stem to the human-making frontal lobes, but they can't be separated out or denied. We may be technically advanced, but we're techno savages beneath our pinstripes—monkeys with gizmos.

SFF, and the best literary writers, recognize this, I think. We are more than the sum of our mechanistic parts and our gadgets.

Ford quotes his teacher, John Gardner, about writing being "a vivid and continuous dream." Ford goes on to say that unlike dreams, "with writing it's not something that ends in a few minutes; it carries on through the length of a story or book....you see the story in your head and then basically try to record what you see. You don't comment on it, and you almost fall into a trance. If you do it well, it allows you to get in touch with things that make the story work that you're not even conscious of." He tells his writing students that less control will get them in touch with what the story is really about.

Sure, I know so-called "organized" writers (vs. us messy organic types) will probably disagree. But...

Yeah, for people like me it's about haunting the boundaries of reason and pushing through the paper wall that separates us from...the other. That may be me talking, not Jeffrey Ford, but he definitely put me in the zone to think about this stuff.

Writing isn't a mechanical process—just like life isn't. Writing is an experience, a search after meaning, a way of trying to make sense out of things that may be contradictory or beyond our previous experience. It's a process of reconciling irreconcilable differences, of holding more than one truth inside your head at a time, of stretching beyond your level of understanding or emotional maturity. It's about taking risks and pushing the envelope, even if the envelope is only the one inside your own soul. Writing is standing on the edge of a precipice and not being afraid to see if you can fly. It's also about jumping and falling on your face. But hey, it wouldn't be any fun if there wasn't the risk of catastrophic failure, now would it?

Current Mood: flighty
Current Music: "Falling Down" by Tom Waits

Sometimes I start to write a story and it's all there, right on the tip of my brain just waiting to spill over onto the page. Most times that's not the case, though. Most times I write stories in stops and starts, pick them up, work in a frenzy, put them down unfinished—and maybe I don't pick them up again for months, sometimes years. Sometimes it takes years for me to finish a given story. This is also true for novels. Thank gosh golly I'm not one of those writers who loses it if I drop a story mid-draft.

Many times I've tried writing the rational, organized way that others manage, but it doesn't work for me at all. I tend to get writers' block if I go that route. Outlining, determined finishing of a story in one determined pushed—none of that discipline thing works. Those techniques are the only ones which well and truly kill a story for me.

I'm very dedicated about writing every day and I certainly can push through to the conclusion of a long piece of writing, but I seem to need that psychological permission to bail if I need to. Often I don't bail, but I need that option. My irrational technique works in terms of productivity because I've always got plenty of stories and novels in the pipeline ready to be picked up again. Something is always ready to be finished.

It's hard to say why a given story will all of a sudden sit up one day and say, "Hey! I'm ready!" I think there are probably a lot of different reasons. Sometimes I hit a certain point and realize I haven't done enough research; sometimes I've had false notions about my characters and have to stop until I know them better; sometimes I'll hit an unbreakable knot in a plot and know I have to let it be for awhile until my unconscious comes up with a better solution. I don't often consciously work on these problems, but the stories aren't dead in my back brain. I'll have dreams about them, daydreams about them, sudden insights, and I'll dutifully jot them down in the story's folder and go on with whatever I was doing. Eventually a sort of critical mass takes over and it's time to go; sometimes something really big slaps me in the face and I know it's time to tackle the story again.

Then sometimes, like tonight, I'll be reading or watching or discussing and a little lightbulb pops over my head and I'll realize that the reason I stopped writing Story A was because I have all the pieces there but the psychological or mythological undercurrents haven't been knitted together properly, or even understood properly. I wasn't ready to write the story because I hadn't advanced enough conceptually to get the job done.

I was reading The Philosopher's Secret Fire again tonight (my light weekend reading) and had such a breakthrough. The elements of Story A were in place, but I wasn't understanding the scenes and images my unconscious was throwing onto the page. Because the images confused me, the story confused me and I had to stop. I won't mention the story because the one thing besides organization that will kill a story dead for me is talking about it too much upfront. It very much has to be between me and my unconscious—our little secret. S/he's a very jealous animus/anima,

Odd, but I almost feel as if my Muse is male. Animus. If Keats's can be a belle dame sans merci I guess mine can be an homme. I hate categorizing him/her too closely, though. You never know what's going to p!ss Muse off and make Muse go hide.

I love my Muse, I do I do I do. I will feed my Muse strawberries and walnuts (don't ask me, that's what s/he wants) and dry my Muse's feet with my long, red hair if my Muse will only stay to play.

And play is the only way to get any work done in my world.

Okay, Ramona's heading into a whole weird area I hadn't even anticipated. She does what with who???

The thing is, she let me know very clearly that she's tired of being the butt of jokes. Oh yeah, she realizes the comic potential of a woman who owns a chicken ranch full of chickens-as-not-to-be-eaten-pets and suspects aliens keep chicken-napping them. But she's letting me know she's more then a one-trick pony, so to speak. She's got feelings, she's got dimensions, she's had a lot of serious s**t happen in her life and if you'd had the same things happen, you might see aliens around every chicken coop. She doesn't mind a little good-natured laugher, but she doesn't want to be laughed at. Who does?

There's more to her then that, she wants me to know. I didn't realize how angry she was, for one, or how aware she was of what people were saying behind her back. I knew she was vulnerable, even childlike at times, but I didn't realize how much she hurt inside. And I knew she wanted a man in her life, but I didn't realize how much she resented me trying to palm her off on the ex-sailor who runs the donut shop. He's not a bad guy, but she wants me to develop his character a bit more before she'll consider him.

In the meantime, she has other donuts to fry. And she wants me to take her there. I never even suspected...

Don't know where we're headed, but it'll be interesting when we get there.

You see, I've got two novels set in Dos Lunas County. The first one I've talked about in this here blog—the one I'm thinking of stringing together from some stories I wrote a couple of years back, that I'm thinking of calling Son of A Wayward Moon. But Tara thinks I should call it Son of A Wanton Moon, right Tara? ;-) So I don't know what that one's eventually going to be called.

Anyway, the other novel which got about 230 pages done before it went on hiatus, is called Venus In Transit. This novel has a prominent secondary character named Ramona. Ramona's also got a short story called Ramona! The Chickens! which was the basis of the novel—really, the basis of the whole Dos Lunas cycle—that never quite got done, either. So Ramona is not an unimportant character, but she is a frustrated one because she's never really got to have her whole say about anything.

The thing is, she's now invaded Son of A Whatever-the-Hell. Big time. I was trying to finish a story which is central to the story arc of the novel's hero, JK. And in steps Ramona, just blabbing away—and she won't shut up. She insists she's got something important to say about this story when to me she's looking like a big tangent and distraction. And no matter what I try to work around her and get back to JK, she grabs me by the collar, points to herself and says, "Focus on me!"

Because I'm one of those cursed organic writers, I can never be sure if a tangent is a tangent or if the tangent is really my subconscious telling me something about the story I need to know. I can never be sure if finishing the tangent will help me see the story in a completely new light, or if it's just a hijacking in process. Whichever it is, I'm afraid Ramona is not going to shut up until I let her have her say.

Sometimes characters do not care a fig about my carefully laid out writerly plans. Sometimes they go on talking and hijacking and distracting until I finally give in and pay attention to them. Sometimes some of my best work has come out of these character strong arm tactics. Sometimes I wonder who's really writing whom in this great big wacky world.

It's a scary place inside my brain. At least that's what my mind elves tell me.

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Echoes in a Hollow Space

I'm here because I'm here because I'm here

Entries tagged with organic writing

Story

Leaps

Follower

Follow

Infodump outrage

Jesse? Is that you?

Instinctual writing

The dreaded organic writing disease

I quit. Sort of.

Foiled

The organic writer's creed

Haunting Boundaries

Being Ready to Write a Story

Things Are Getting Complicated

Thus Spake Ramona

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May 2025

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