How do you write?

[sleepybutawake]

After spending the last couple of hours chipping away at a story I'm trying to get into shape for an upcoming contest, I thought I'd take a little break and pose some inquiry on this badass literary commune.

How do you write? Are you a plotter, an outliner? Or do you go into without preconceived ideas of direction and let the story dictate its own movement? Do you begin with characters, themes, or a just scene you want to explore? What sort of time frame or schedule do you like to work in? How about revisions: when do you know enough is enough? How did you arrive at your particular methodology? Was there ever some advice from another writer that helped you find what works for you?

I'd love to hear anything you'd like to share on your practice to the craft. If you feel like you've covered these questions somewhere else on da interwebz, please hook a fella up with a link.

Looking forward to your responses. Until then, follow the bard's advice and keep your worm firm, your tool cool, and don't let your meat loaf. I'm pretty sure Shakespeare said that.

[hopfrog]

I usually make mental and physical notes if I am studying a Lovecraft story on which to elaborate. I never make a concrete outline but just jot down impressions and lines in my various notebooks. I try to find the theme and the recurring motifs mentally, dreaming the story ideas over and over again. I used to always write a rough draft into a notebook with pen, but I can no longer do so. I type the first draft right into ye laptop using Microsoft Word, and then I'll print that out and go over it with a pen to make corrections, deletions, additions. Then I do a polish. I'm very lazy as a writer and usually don't labor over and over on a story, anxious to begin the next new thing.

[Frater_Tsalal]

I find that the projects I really try to plan out or outline are usually the ones that fail horribly (when it comes to novels that is: not so much with short stories). I kind of envy those writers who can establish some kind of a routine: it seems with each book I write I have to reinvent the wheel anew to try to find what works for it. I always read about professional writers who get up at like 5 AM every day and spend so many hours banging out a set number of pages. I could never be that kind of writer. Here are some writing tips from one of my favorite writers, Dennis Cooper, that I've always liked:

-- Study the content, form, style, and structure of your very favorite music, visual art, movies, pornography, video games, fiction, etc. (Do not prioritize fiction over the other mediums.) Why are your favorites so special? What do they have in common? If you can figure that out, that's what you want to write.

-- Fiction is a drug. The reader is a druggie. The writer is the chemist designing a drug that will give the reader an ideal high. Don't design a drug that already exists. If you do, no one will remember the high you gave them.

-- Characters are not real people. They are designs with human names. The design itself can be revised into any other design as long as it retains its name and keeps you fascinated while you're writing.

-- Life doesn't have a plot. It never deliver what you expect or want or are promised. Life's interesting even when nothing dramatic or important is happening. Pay close attention to the shape of your life. Realize that everyone's life has a unique shape. If you want to write about your life or someone else's life, do its unique shape justice.

-- If someone you respect tells you that you've very talented, believe him or her. People who recognize talent are always right. The vast majority of people who don't recognize talent are always wrong.

-- Every sentence is important. Every sentence is a gymnast. Every sentence is a detail in a work of architecture. Every sentence is hiding something.

-- If it helps, I never took a single fiction writing class or workshop. When I first started writing seriously, most of my writer friends were much more talented than I was, and they received much more praise than I did. Not a one of them became a published writer. For the first ten years that I was writing, 95 percent of the work I submitted to magazines was rejected without so much as an encouraging word. Twenty-seven publishers rejected my first novel 'Closer' before Grove Press accepted it.

[A. Northman]

Quote Originally Posted by sleepybutawake

Are you a plotter, an outliner? Or do you go into without preconceived ideas of direction and let the story dictate its own movement?

I have tried several methods for planning a story, and it seems that strict sketching of is not for me. I usually have the basis of the story in my head before I begin to write: how it begins, what are the main conflicts/turning points, the climax, the ending. (My attempts to write stream of consciousness have not been very successful). Sometimes I even transfer this basic pattern from head onto paper, at least if the story is going to be lenghty. But if I accurately sketch for example every scene before writing out the story, I feel that the story is dead before it's even born. If I've basically written the whole story down and I the only thing I have left to do is to shape it into a literary form, the actual writing process feels like editorial work, which is more tiresome than gazing to the sea and waiting for the great old sleepyhead Cthulhu to wake up. I try to keep the story fresh and vital (for myself) until it's ready.

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Do you begin with characters, themes, or a just scene you want to explore?

Since I write Lovecraftian/Ligottian horror, the alpha and the omega of the work is always pretty much the same: the all-pervasive terror beyond actions of human beings, the great disease that infects everyone and everything. Of course minor themes can be added – for example, I foisted some of my opinions concerning art into my newest story.

It's about building an interesting story around these themes. I get ideas in several ways – an impressive line in other writer's text can get the machine going, a piece of music can activate my imagination, and, of course, dreams sometimes serve as a source of inspiration. Sometimes I feel that they're just "coming from somewhere". (From my daemon muse? At the moment I'm reading Matt Cardin's wonderful book about the subject, and it has already opened my eyes for many things).

Character development is something I'm not good at. My characters are always more or less cardboard, and my head explodes if I'm even trying to think about developing deep relationships between them. Maybe it's just about the essence of my stories (or just about my attitudes); I feel that deep character development is waste of time, for in my stories, characters are more like objects than subjects. I make the narrator character to suit the story as well as possible; his perception of the world is important, but after all he's only a vehicle to convey a picture of the story world.

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What sort of time frame or schedule do you like to work in?

I write when I feel like it. The ”Stephen King method” (you must write strict 2000 words a day, even when it feels the most abhorrent thing in the universe, even more abhorrent than the universe itself, and even when you've just lost your pet koala) is not working with me. (Maybe it has to work with a writer who must get a 1000 page book ready in two months, but I wouldn't say that it's a good advice for every writer). If I'm participating a contest or an anthology project or something, deadlines are forcing me to make some sort of schedules. For me, nighttime is the best time for writing. But not for revising.

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How about revisions: when do you know enough is enough?

I hate revising, yet never feeling that I've done enough of it. Literary masochism!

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How did you arrive at your particular methodology?

I think the methodology I'm using now was my original methodology. Sometimes you just have to travel through foreign towns and foreign lands to get back home.

Well, I'm a fledgling writer with a merit of one published story, so all this was probably utterly nonsensical nonsense and nothing but nonsense. The following little essay is not nonsense. (But in some points it has caused my hair metaphorically to turn gray when translating it for the magazine of the Finnish HPL Historical Society). Most of you are probably familiar with it, but in case that someone's not:

"Notes on Writing Weird Fiction" by H. P. Lovecraft

It's 3 am and this was ”Northman's Nocturnal Babblings!” I'm sorry. Good night, friends.

[Nicole Cushing]

Quote Originally Posted by sleepybutawake

How do you write? Are you a plotter, an outliner? Or do you go into without preconceived ideas of direction and let the story dictate its own movement? Do you begin with characters, themes, or a just scene you want to explore? What sort of time frame or schedule do you like to work in? How about revisions: when do you know enough is enough? How did you arrive at your particular methodology? Was there ever some advice from another writer that helped you find what works for you?

I try to write every day, and keep a word count goal (about 500 words a day). I cut myself slack, though, if I'm involved in a lot of heavy revision of previously written stories.

My initial story ideas often come to me as visual images. Sometimes they come to me in nightmares. Unfortunately, nightmares lack any true plot and thus I find it insufficient merely to transcribe the nightmare. I find that I can only use one particular element of the nightmare (maybe one image, or one sensation), and then build the rest of the story around it.

With revisions...I lean toward the more obsessive, perfectionist end of the continuum. I'm not satisfied unless the thing is as polished as it can possibly be before sending it out. I've found it helpful to run my pieces by other writers and get their critique of the piece before sending it out. For awhile, my rule of thumb was always to get three critiques before sending it out. Lately, I've not done that quite as much because I have more confidence in what I'm doing...but I think it really helped early on.

As far as how I arrived at my methodology...trial and error. I spent a long time trying to build a writing career without getting critiques, and I didn't get very far. For me, they were very helpful.

As far as advice from others...the best advice I ever heard was exceedingly simple: read every day, write every day. I've been doing that (more or less) for almost 4 years now, and I'm glad I took that advice. I think it's been invaluable to the improvement of my writing craft.

But here's the thing about writing advice...take it all with a grain of salt. Over the course of a writer's career he or she hears all kinds of advice -- often uttered with the tone of pontification and sometimes quite wrong. While advice can be helpful, nothing takes the place of trial and error!

Hope this helps!

[Karnos]

I started writing "seriously" recently, as recently as six or seven months ago and I have already seen lots of improvements. I finally said "#### it, you need discipline" so I took a workshop with a couple of writers who have helped me greatly.

I still do not have a method of sorts to write something. The way it works with me is that I think up of some main plot idea and then go from there. By default I have a vague notion of how everything begins and ends, although it often deviates a little. Only in one case it changed greatly, so much that it was a completely different story.

I do not plot or outline on paper, although I guess I will do that when I start writing longer stuff. I write by long hand, using either A4 paper or any journal/moleskin type of notebook, although I do not find them as comfortable to write on as plain paper and consider them convenient gimmicks to take on your person for writing during trips by plane or train instead of carrying a heavy chunk of office paper.

The first thing I write is not the first draft, it is the basic idea of the story as it comes to me. I edit heavily as I write this early skeleton, so much that I can spend seven hours and by the end of the session I may have only written five paragraphs. When this is done, I rewrite the whole thing, again by hand, and make corrections and more editing, fix little details that made no sense and correct lose ends.

I write with black, blue and red pens. Black is for the text as it flows, red is for margin notes, cross outs, (lots of cross outs, entire paragraphs, sometimes the page looks like a piece of white meat with gashes) arrows, numbers, etc. Blue pen is for the corrected words or lines, above the red cross outs. All my paragraphs are numbered (1, 2, 3...) for control reasons and, when I have time and lots boredom, I write down how many words each paragraph has.

THEN I write the whole thing on Word format and THAT becomes the first draft. I normally do not revise these drafts until weeks latter. I write in Spanish, but I also am planing to write original stuff in English. I cannot translate my own stuff, for some reason, so it is easier to write original stories in both languages.

I have a horrible grammar, I really do, so I have a dictionary with me all the time. I'm not ashamed of admitting I confuse the spelling of many words, many times writing with "s" words that go with "c" or "z", but what can I do? I'm just a human

Another thing I do is to go out at bars or cafes and just be there and listen to the way people talk (and what they talk about) as well as how they dress, what kind of earrings or piercings they have, tattoos, etc. I once met a girl on a bar, tending the place. She had this wonderful tattoo on her arm; it was a skull, shaped like a heart, above a parchment that read "dead girls never say no". I promised her that she would be a character in one of my stories, and I fulfilled that promise last week. I'm not overtly descriptive, but I do like to make my characters as real as possible.

That's it. Sometimes I do some research before writing something, but depends on the subject matter. I'm still finding a foothold on this, and I resumed writing recently, last week, after month and a half of not writing anything. I write really short stuff, normally in the 20-30 paragraphs length, but I want to write longer things. Reason for writing on this length was the time constrains of the workshops, but I want to be a novelist (along with writing short fiction) so I need to step out of my current comfort zone.

Thanks for starting this thread, I love this stuff.

[sleepybutawake]

I'm taking the summer off and trying to treat writing as a part time job. I'm shooting for four hours a day in the chair, but I'm averaging nearly three hours usually. I hope to have a book completed for Kindle and Nook sales within the next few months.

Making this time obligatory and forcing myself to be creative when I don't want to be is teaching me a lot about my strengths and weaknesses. The biggest lesson I'm trying to internalize is not to edit on the fly, but to let it go and worry about revision later. I worry my backspace key will be worn out before I have this down, but I'm working at it.

One nice thing about mandatory time in the chair is I'm not giving myself time to back off the material. My stories tend to get long quickly. This tendency, coupled with my compulsive need to edit and refine paragraphs until they are perfect, lead me to getting frustrated at how little progress I've made on the work as a whole, which then leads me to giving up on the story. When I return to it, I've inevitably come up with new concepts I want to include, so then I start the whole damn piece over.

The greatest successes I've had as a writer came from a creative writing class I took a few semesters ago. With deadlines staring at me, I didn't have time to go through my usual bull####; it was either turn something in or get an F. Some really decent stuff came out of that class; an excerpt from a longer piece actually got published in a lit magazine! (incidentally, that piece is in the Repository here..."Mr. Gibbon's Info Brokerage" or some such, if anyone's interested.)

So, yeah, I'm trying to internalize the "write fast, write hard" mentality, and leave the revision process for complete drafts.

Anyway, thanks for the responses. I'm really fascinated at how people manifest the drive to write, and its interesting how different your experiences seem to be.

[Odalisque]

I write every day without fail. At least, I'm pretty sure that I've written every day over the last couple of years (probably longer... perhaps the last five years).

As of 5th June 2012, when I complete my current chapter, I'll be seven and three quarter volumes into a series of twelve novels.

My writing methods have changed over the years. These days, I like to start with a set of characters and a situation... then take it from there. The plot, in my experience, takes care of itself. In the first chapter of my current novel, Jane (my narrator) considers writing another book (the book the reader is reading, of course). One my characters says to her:

“Start your book, Jane, and the goddesses will supply its content. Have faith.”

And that's pretty well how I find it.

In the nature of things, in a series of novels, the characters with whom I start are usually already well known to me. But it's not always so. The volume I completed last year took as its cast of characters the daughters of protagonists from previously written books. I didn't really know them at all. I had a situation: they had just started at university. I started on a draft for chapter one with two them sharing a residence room, and talking. That wasn't working. So, I started again, four of them, having been drinking whisky on their first night, decide to break into the administrative building. I had no idea where that would lead, but actions have consequences... and those consequences were the story.

Unlike some others, I don't think in terms of wordage, but in pages. A page is A4 covered in 14 point Times New Roman, with the margins Word sets as standard (whatever they are).

I write directly on the computer. When a chapter is complete (as a first draft) I read through it (mostly silently) making many changes. In making this first revision, I pay especial attention to the beginning and the end. I read these aloud, and continue doing so until I've read them three times without making further changes. In between the beginning and the end, I read the text silently, at this stage -- unless I'm very doubtful about how a passage sounds. When I've completed this, I have my second draft.

I then (on another day) read the second draft aloud. If my tongue trips over anything, I make what seem necessary changes, go back a little way and try again. If it's still wrong, I make further changes. Eventually, I have a complete third draft chapter with seems to read (aloud) well enough.

Then, on a further day, I read the chapter aloud yet again, this time more slowly and more carefully. Having made further changes, and assured myself that it reads well, I have my polished text.

Of course, I could go through it yet again, but one has to call a halt at some point.

[Derek]

Most of my efforts begin with countless squinty-eyed attempts to decipher my own convoluted handwriting from the notebook archive.

I dream one day of being as organised as this:

James Joyce notebook page

[Odalisque]

One other thing, my writing computer isn't connected to the Internet. The pesky Internet is too much of a distraction.