At university, I used a simple method for writing essays:
- Research/analyze, and make notes
- Outline, by arranging the notes into a logical order
- Write
There was no revision process, especially since I was using a typewriter.
Yes, it has been a few years since I was a university student.
Last spring, I wrote a piece about jazz fandom; something I know a lot about.
I felt really good about it, in spite of the fact that I had never written a list piece before and it was humor and I write very little humor. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency was happy with it too. Since then, I’ve been trying to apply this approach to how I write short stories.
To substitute for the knowledge of jazz history accumulated from library books and issues of Downbeat Magazine, I now start my writing process with days and days brainstorming.
I start with a germ of an idea, often stemming from a prompt. Then, I spin it off in as many oddball or interesting ways as possible. This requires one or two or three full writing sessions. Just listing ideas and seeing if they might lead somewhere, trying out variations, searching for a viable lead.
After this process, I have something like:
- a troublesome personality trait and its likely origin, or
- interesting manifestations (imagined or real) of an internal stressor, or
- a single intriguing line of dialog that defines a character and their situation, or
- a situation that allows me to explore how two very similar characters ended up on opposite sides of a decision line.
These kernels are the equivalent of a topic for an essay.
Then the research.
I spend the next five, six, seven, eight writing sessions expanding on the idea.
- What are the possible explanations why something that seems true feels true?
- What background context is useful to understand the situation?
- What scenes might show relevant things?
- What characters might fit?
- Jobs? Family? Worldview? World?
I’ll have 4,000 – 8,000 words of notes for what might be a 2,000 word story. Most go something like: ‘This, but maybe this, or maybe this, or else that’. Many are in conflict with or are mutually exclusive of each other.
The conflict and confusion are fine. Maybe the conflicting material will fit an antagonist. And the confusion is still helping me to understand possible parameters of the story that I’m unfolding.
For an essay, I’m looking for facts or elements that support the thesis. For fiction, the only facts are a little research on locations or science or procedures. Because so much is as yet undefined, I’m brainstorming material and I don’t know how it’s all going to fit together and am trying to leave as many doors open as possible.
Some things will feel stronger. More interesting. More important. I’ll highlight a key word or two in red or blue font. And, slowly, some will feel like they can work in conjunction with some others.
The story is beginning to coagulate.
This is a very exciting time. Threads from one thought begin to stick to others like axions in my brain. (One day, I’ll have to devote a blog post to this step. The problem is, this moment is so exciting that I can’t think about anything else.)
I may have no sentences for the story. Or, I may have a few lines of test dialog or stabs at some internal narrative, but these are vague guideposts and I still may chose to ignore these.
But soon, I’ll feel the urge to start actually writing.
The first draft does not take long. I wrote a 1,000 word complete draft in one session. For another story, I think it took three sessions to write 4,000 words.
Writing using an outline is much faster than pantsing. You don’t get stuck waiting for the character to tell you what’s going to happen next.
To this point I’ve spent:
- 1-3 sessions getting a topic
- 4-8 sessions gathering material
- 1-3 sessions drafting
Since I didn’t revise in university, my essay would have been done, but now, I’m less than half way finished.
Revising and editing takes more time than I have spent on all the other steps combined. During revision, that 1,000 word draft became a 2,000 word story, and the 4,000 word story ballooned to 6,400 words and then down to 5,700.
For the piece for McSweeney’s, I didn’t spend much time on revision. I did remove and add and tighten and especially regroup and reorder, but it didn’t take long. Partly this was because it was a list piece so there wasn’t much prose and no transitions between scenes, but the biggest reason was because it, like an essay, was not fiction. All the jazz anecdotes I used were facts that I already knew and one rumor that I thought was a fact.
My new writing process changes and speeds up the way I get to the completed first draft, but it doesn’t speed up the extensive rewriting and editing process. In fact, I probably spend more time revising now because that first draft comes out so fast that there are more holes and unclear phrasings to be fixed.
There are other, larger differences between these stories and their writing processes compared with the ones I’ve pantsed in the past.
- They are theme-based rather than character-driven:
- The point of the story is much clearer to me, though I have issues making the theme clear for the reader. I’m often expecting the reader to piece together the point of each scene and to understand a lot of subtext, and it’s not all coming across. This may be the equivalent of a beginning writer seeing things in their head and not putting it on the page. Hopefully, this, like the beginning writer’s problem, with get easier with practice.
- I don’t experience significant blocks:
- There are always small pauses or stumbles but because the brainstorming stage is so wide open, I can always find ways to come up with more. And, during the writing phase, the outline tells me where I’m going. If I’m missing something, I have my notes to help me refocus or to get more or alternative scenes.
- They are coming out fast:
- I think I used to write five, six, seven short stories per year. In the last ten months I’ve completed thirteen stories, from 300 to 5,700 words in length though mostly on the shorter end.
- I’m not inside the characters to the same depth that I was when the characters were driving the story. My hope is that all the years of writing character based stories helps me to write characters that are believable and relatable, but I sense that there is a balance or perspective that is still out there for me to learn.
I’ve always outlined to some extent with novels. In the last two, I pantsed 1/2 of one and 5/6 of the other and outlined the rest. Prior to those, I always had some form of outline before writing, but that was a necessity because I wrote those for NaNoWriMo or the Three Day Novel.
There is something deeply satisfying about getting inside a character and looking around at the world from inside. There is also something satisfying but in a different way to think about a story until fragments start to connect and then to blast your way through the first draft.