Back in grade school, when they taught us to write essays, the first step was always “decide on a topic,” and the second one was “make an outline/plan.” Nowadays there’s a lot more focus on creativity, i.e., writing fiction instead of essays. Based on what I’ve seen in school visits and from talking with teachers and kids, though, the process they teach is pretty much the same: Pick an idea, decide on your audience, make a plan.

No writer I know works this way, not even the ones who really do pick audiences and make outlines.

I’ve been thinking about this a bunch lately, because I just finished a book and I’m in the process of booting up the next one. And it occurs to me that the very first thing I do is decide why.

Why covers a lot of things: why write at all, why start another book when I have so much else going on, why pick this book to do next instead of that one. There are a lot of answers, but the one answer that it occurs to me I have never heard from other writers is “to get published.”

Now, possibly this is because publication is a milestone that most of my writer friends have already passed, but I don’t think so. For one thing, selling one story is no guarantee that you’ll sell the next. For another, I don’t hear it from my unpublished writer friends, either. Not if you ask them “Why are you writing that story?” Answers range from “For fun” to “I just have to,” but “To get published” is never what anyone comes up with first. Publication is always tacked on at the end “…and of course, I’d like to get it published one day.”

I mentioned this to Beth-my-walking-buddy and she pointed out that publication is the validation, not the motivation. It’s the thing that says I did a good job, not the reason I’m trying to do the job in the first place.

“Why am I writing this?” is not actually something I think about all that often, but knowing whether I’m writing a story to fulfill the option clause in my contract, to make one of my friends smile, because the idea wouldn’t leave me alone, because I have bills to pay, or because this is a story I am desperately in love with and want to tell, does make a difference. Sometimes more than one thing is true at a time, and it’s easy to forget that wanting to tell the story is really more important to me than paying the bills. And when I forget why I’m writing and what my original vision of the story was (the one that got me excited about it in the first place), I tend to wander off track, and eventually things bog down and get difficult.

The second thing I do when I’m booting up a new book is brainstorming. Sometimes, it’s just tossing ideas around in my head; sometimes, it’s the kind beloved of corporate managers, where I sit down with pen and paper and draw spidery diagrams all over a page; sometimes, it’s focused on one particular aspect of the story. At the moment, I have two of these going: the first is an untidy heap of ideas, everything from scraps of possible dialog to potential characters and backgrounds to plots to “things I would like to see happen” (Max chewing out Jillian, for instance). Some of these will end up in the story, some not.

The other is a focused brainstorm on sevens – that is, lists of seven things (seven deadly sins, seven cardinal virtues, seven chakras, seven colors of the rainbow, seven holy mountains, seven wise men, seven wonders of the world, seven habits of successful people…every kind of seven I can think of or find). This one is because I know that my main character will be facing seven related tasks or tests, and noodling around with all the other sevens people have come up with makes me look at lots more possibilities for how to link my tasks together. I don’t actually plan on using any of the real-life lists as the basis for whatever I come up with; they just sort of get me in the mood, and then I start making my own lists of seven things that might go together the way I want them to.

Eventually, I’ll have enough of this story-stuff heaped up, and I’ll organize it into a plot outline (the third step), and then I’ll buckle down to serious writing. The point is, the outline comes rather far down the process (brainstorming for a whole novel can take a while). Outlining is not even a requirement; it’s just a tool for organizing all that brainstorming that I find useful.

I think that all writers go through this sequence, though few of us break the process down into steps (and some of the steps moosh together, or happen so fast that the writer doesn’t even notice). For those who don’t bother outlining, the organizing and writing happen together; for writers who write to find out what happens next, the brainstorming and the organizing and the writing all happen at the same time; for of the “sit down in front of a blank screen and surprise myself” variety, even the vision of what the story is and could become happens as the words go down on the page one after another. And there’s no particular reason to slow down and try to do the parts of the process one at a time, unless the just-sit-down-and-write thing stops working for a while.

I do think that it’s useful to think about this stuff, because it allows me to notice when I’m trying to do things in the wrong order. If I think of my outline as a necessary first step, instead of as a tool for organizing all the brainstorming, I get extremely frustrated when it doesn’t go well. But really, if I haven’t done the brainstorming, if the story-stuff hasn’t reached critical mass, there’s nothing to organize. And a generic outline (“There are some good guys who have a problem. They start trying to solve it, but they have trouble with some bad guys…”) is pretty useless.

9 Comments
  1. …publication is the validation, not the motivation. It’s the thing that says I did a good job, not the reason I’m trying to do the job in the first place.

    And there you show the reason for the school method in a nutshell: for most of the people being taught, the validation – i.e. getting a good grade at the end of it – is the motivation. So a standardized process, producing a valid result if followed closely and skilfully, is what will be taught, and what will attract funding. It doesn’t have to catch fire, or produce any text anybody would ever want to read twice. It only has to emit an appropriate spectrum of certificates, and a class of graduates who will never write The Eye of Argon by accident. Shame, because some of them surely ought to.

    The only two things that redeem the process at all, are that people who really want to write creatively generally aren’t gaming their grades, and that people who want to teach such things generally have motivations way beyond maximizing customer and management satisfaction. And more power to their elbows!

    Nonetheless, we get this unhappy situation where people are commonly educated to believe that speaking a word of power is, in essence, Level 36 of Writing A Hamburger Essay. I’ve run into plenty of the damage done by that myth, and should like to thank you once again for your indefatigable efforts in dispelling it.

  2. It seems that my process is the sit down with a vague idea and a few scenes sketching out a possible direction, then start at the beginning and fill in the sketch. Unfortunately, this does not allow me to avoid the outlining process. Outlining happens in revisions, when I’m in the middle of a scene or section that is just not working right, and I’m like, all right, what is the right sequence of events, of arguments, of meals that will mark the right sequence of the characters mental processes, their change in attitude toward each other, their recovery from depression. And i end up with 600 little numbered lists and scraps of paper with bullet points on them.

    There is no escape!

  3. I have found that sitting down and writing a formal outline prior to writing anything (essay or otherwise) completely bogs me down. My brain has to take an idea and run with it – not over analyze something that doesn’t even have a form yet.

    For school essays, I always cheated: I wrote the essay first and then went back and filled in the formal outline. But a three-page essay is way different in terms of organization, purpose and audience than the story I am attempting to write at the moment.

    And you’re right. My reason for writing this story is the “It’s just something I have to do” and a “I want to be able to read it to my kids” when I have some. (And getting published wouldn’t hurt either. *laugh*)

    From your description though, I think that my brainstorming needs to finish filling in more of the central plot. “They go some places and do some things, and they eventually arrive at the end” is where I’m stuck at the moment. Well, not quite that bad (I know what the ending looks like, it’s just all that track inbetween that’s still a bit blurry).

  4. When I wrote essays for school, I organized first and wrote them later. For creative writing, I have sometimes produced outlines, and when I do the outline is rarely close at all to what I eventually write. If I tried to follow my outlines, my stories would not be as good, because the plot changes when I discover new things about my characters (or flaws in my logic for the plot.) Usually, I know what the ending will look like, or at least sort of, although other times I discover that what I thought was the whole story was just an intro to the real story.

  5. I write outlines as really, really, really rough drafts to ensure there’s a whole plot there.

  6. Apologies for the rather bleak, bilious, and tangential nature of my first response: you struck a lifelong sore point back there, which has not been much soothed by a career spent mostly in education.

    On the constructive side, my process typically works something like this:

    1. Be seized by a rage to write something, usually ridiculous.

    2. Write until it is too ridiculous. Curse, and produce outlines until it makes sense, and I understand what it’s really about.

    3. Write until it is too sensible. Rage against the outline until the tale bursts forth from its smouldering shards, and I understand that I never really understood the heart of it at all.

    4. If it is not finished, goto 2.

    5. Rewrite it until it reads sensibly.

    This works except when it crashes, though the proportions of sense and fury in the successful instances vary as wildly as anything.

  7. I have another take on the writing formula taught in schools. My current job is recording audio textbooks for disabled students at the local college. One of the recent books was for business communication and had an interesting statistic.

    “Two thirds of all jobs in the business world require writing skills.”

    Interesting when you figure that they probably averaged in the “hamburger-flipping” jobs with all the others. After all, authors are NOT the only persons to make a living off writing. Lawyers, Doctors, Cops and Scientists all make a living writing.
    THEY are the ones who fill up the majority of the seats in those High School English classes and THEY are the ones most helped by that little formula.

  8. The problem I always had with the formulaic, jump-through-hoops writing things was the rigidity of the time limits; everything else, I could figure out a way to do my own thing within the requisite structure, but I was always behind on the “final” draft (especially for the writing sections of all those standardized tests… I never had time to proofread and rewrite a final draft as they suggested you should, in order to get the full five points or whatever).
    StarKin – Scientists (for example) have their own, very specific writing formulas that are tailored to their needs and wouldn’t make sense for other applications, and which they spend a lot of time learning how to do correctly. Can you imagine a 200,000 word epic fantasy novel with a “Materials and Methods” section? 😛 I don’t think people who enter professional fields that use this type of specialized writing are any more helped or hurt by the formulaic way writing is often taught than professional authors are.

  9. I love what you say about outlining as a way to organize the ideas that come from brainstorming. I needed that reminder. Thanks!