The way a lot of critics, writing teachers, and even writers talk, every writing decision is conscious and deliberate, made with great care and consideration. It doesn’t matter whether it’s something small, like the exact word choice or sentence structure; something large, like the interlocking plot arcs in a ten-book series; something specific and concrete, like the color of the carpet in the villain’s office; or something intangible, like a character’s emotions or the symbolism of a dream sequence – if it’s in a book, it got there because the author had a clear, conscious, story-related reason for putting it there.
The only way this can be true is if you consider “It felt right” to be a clear, conscious, deliberate reason, and “I needed more word count” or “The editor wanted it” to be a story-related one.
There are simply too many necessary decisions in the crafting of a novel of fifty, eighty, or a hundred thousand plus words for every writer to stop and consider all of them every time. Word choice and sentence rhythm affect pacing, but so do overall information density and the amount of progress in plot and characterization. Questions and unsolved mysteries can draw the reader in, but if there are too many, the reader can be overwhelmed trying to keep track of them all … and how many is “too many”? Dialog can convey plot, characterization, background, and setting, but so can body language, internal monolog, action, and narrative summary.
In short, every writing decision affects every other writing decision. Making every last decision consciously is like trying to stabilize a giant hanging mobile with hundreds of arms and thousands of hanging objects in different sizes, shapes, and weights – every time you move one, dozens of other things have to be adjusted to keep everything balanced. On the other hand, trying to do it all by guess and by golly is likely to end up with everything in an unmanageable tangle. As with most things in writing, reality is a range, with most people somewhere in the middle.
The trouble is that it is a lot easier to talk about the analytical side of writing – the conscious, deliberate decisions – than it is to talk about the intuitive side. I have a bookcase full of how-to-write books, and at least 90% of them focus on the analytical side. I have half a shelf or more of books on writing that I am willing to recommend for various general or specific problems that analytically-inclined writers are having, from Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style to Linda Seger’s Making a Good Script Great. I have only two that I’m willing to recommend to writers of a primarily intuitive bent: Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and Ray Bradbury’s The Zen of Writing.
Yet the intuitive side of writing is important, if only because it’s a lot faster than laboriously teasing out each Right Word, Right Phrase, Right Sentence, Right Arrangement Of Sentences In Paragraph, etc. It would take me decades to do that for a novel.
I did not expect one of my characters to show up in the current scene; he was supposed to be hiding out while a different character made some critical explanations. But suddenly, there he was. It wasn’t a conscious, deliberate decision. It was intuitive.
Letting it happen was conscious; I could have looked at his interruption for a minute, erased it, and continued with the way I’d expected the scene to go. I have, in fact, done that on occasion … but not often. Those unplanned twists almost always improve the story in unexpected ways – and what writer doesn’t want an improved story?
Intuition is an unconscious synthesis of all the important things one knows about whatever one is writing. Quite often, there’s a really good logical reason for doing whatever-it-is – at least, every time I’ve taken three or four weeks to analyze what my backbrain wants to do, there has turned out to be a really good logical reason. I just don’t have that kind of time to spend coming up with it, and as long as I trust my backbrain, I don’t need to dig out the reason.
And that is what it comes down to: Trust. Trust in your intuition. It can be extremely difficult to do when part of you wants logical reasons why the story should go this way or that, why the unexpected character should show up in the middle of the banquet, why the protagonist shouldn’t chase after the villain right now even though that’s what you’ve expected him/her to do for chapters and chapters now. Sometimes, though, you just have to remember that “Now that I’m here, it feels right/wrong” is a good enough reason.
This is something I’ve only recently been coming to terms with, that all those people who talk about how they made this or that writing thing happen don’t necessarily do it that way. That’s just how they can best describe it after the fact. For a long time, this left me feeling alienated by the very writing discussions that I craved, because it seemed like everybody else wrote via this deliberate, calculated front-brain process, and I just wing it and it seems to come out all right.
As somebody pretty far over on the intuitive end of the range, the only writing book I’ve ever gotten anything out of is Dorothea Brande’s Becoming A Writer. It shows its age in places (she waxes on the merits of the portable typewriter), and not everything in it clicks for me, but enough does that I keep it by my writing laptop for when I know I should be writing but for some reason am not. It often provides the kick in the pants my backbrain seems to occasionally need.
That’s the book that moved me from trying to write stories to actually writing them. I’m so glad you mentioned it. I’d forgotten about it, and I suspect I’d benefit from reading it again. 😀
I don’t care how much pre-planning or outlining a writer does; unforeseeable things will happen. And sometimes they’re for the best. Often, a character will know more about where the plot should go than you do. It’s part of the writer’s job to know when they’re right and when you’re right.
As to how to tell which is which, all I can say is “Good luck with that.”
A couple pertinent quotations (I’ve got a million of ’em):
“Think of your everyday self as a lost rider on the back of a powerful black horse. The rider may be freaking out. That’s understandable. It’s frightening to be lost. But your everyday self is not who creates the first draft. The first draft is written by the big black horse―your subconscious mind. That horse is smart, and it knows exactly where it’s going. So trust it. It will get you home. Just write. Put down whatever feels right, even if it makes no sense to you. Don’t think too much about it, don’t hold the reins too tight, and soon you’ll see your way again.”
―Nancy Etchemendy
And more succinctly:
“Your subconscious knows way more than you do about writing.”
―Alexandra Sokoloff
I always recommend getting analytical about the work at some point, whether in breaks between writing sessions or in revisions. The reason is not that the analytical approach is better, but the more you look at your own writing analytically, the more you realize you did make good subconscious decisions, and thus can:
– go ahead and trust yourself, as our hostess says, and
– learn where your strengths are, and emphasize them.
But sure, most of my first draft work is intuitive. I’ve just gotten to the point where my conscious can sometimes see what I’m doing while I’m doing it.
I always recommend getting analytical about the work at some point
For me, that’s the critique phase. “About this bit…” says the critiquer, and I reply with how that’s there to support some other bit, enhance charaterization, reveal backstory, and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other. (Like the cat who fell off the back of the couch, I totally meant to do that.) And then, if the critiquer is a good critiquer (a near-mythical beast, but there have been instances), we discuss why that bit’s not really working for that purpose, and what sorts of things might make it work better.
I’ve just gotten to the point where my conscious can sometimes see what I’m doing while I’m doing it.
I’ve intermittently gotten there too, and it always makes me feel terribly clever. I still can’t claim to be doing it “on purpose” on any conscious level, though.
By the way, I’m sure my approach strikes some as far too analytical. But what can I say, I’d been a technical writer for twenty years before writing my first novel. So “what’s the point and how do I present it” before my first word was pretty ingrained in me by then…
The annoying one is when the intuition says, “That won’t work,” and shuts up.
A significant portion of my writing process, right there.
My first novel — A Diabolical Bargain — snuck up on me by pretending to be a novelette, and a major part of the increase was reaching what I thought was the end and discovering the main character still was not happy. TWICE.
Brilliant description of the process!
I recall thinking, in literature classes in high school, that the instructors surely couldn’t believe writers actually thought about all the “literary” details the instructor was finding in the story. I’ve found since that time that a writer does do more of than than my high-school self would have thought. But I was half right. Most of those things are done intuitively, or subconsciously; we can generally come up with the reason if we stop and think about it, but there’s generally no need to think about it — unless we, or someone else, perceives a problem. If our intuition is sound, that black horse usually knows where to go.