Standing on your Head in the Shower

There is no bad way to write a story.  No editor cares how you wrote it.  No editor, to my knowledge, has ever rejected a story on the grounds that the author did not have a plan, character sketches, maps, or time lines before writing the story.  Editors want a good story; if you write it backwards, standing on your head in the shower at 2 a.m., in Greek and then translate it … they won’t care, as long as it’s a good story.  Heck, they won’t even know, unless you tell them.  And it wouldn’t be that much weirder a working method than the ones some of the writers I know use…

Writing is a product-based business, not a service or process-based business.  Editors and readers look at the finished result – the story – and decide if they like it.  How, when, why, where it was produced do not matter, so long as the product – the story – catches and holds the interest of a sufficient number of readers, and carries them along to a satisfying conclusion.  There are no “musts” about the production process; everybody does it differently.  And nobody in the business cares how the author does it, so long as the author turns out stories that other people like to read.

I take that back: there are three types of people who can be described as “in the business” who care (at least sometimes) about the “how” of the writing process: the marketing department, the purveyors of how-to-write systems, and, occasionally, critics.

The marketing department cares only if one’s writing process is sufficiently strange as to be interesting, attract attention, and sell books. They aren’t terribly interested in normal variations, like whether one does or doesn’t use an outline, but if you dress up in costume and play out your character’s adventures or go to extremes to get “actual experience” of things like falling off a mountain or the taste of ashes, or if you do your rough drafts in Spenserian verse and only convert them to prose later…well, if they can use it to sell books, they will. Of course, you have to tell them how you work before they can do anything with it, so it’s the writer’s choice when and whether to mention it.

Critics (some of them, not all) get interested in the writing process when they can use it to bolster their contention that a book is well or poorly written. If they know anything about the writer’s actual process, they will hold it up for admiration (if they think the book is good) or condemnation (if they think the book is bad). A very few, very occasionally, will be overconfident enough to make assumptions about the writer’s process and/or influences when they have no actual knowledge to fall back on. I had the extreme pleasure once of pointing out to one overconfident critic of the Enchanted Forest series that not only had he gotten the order of publication wrong (he’d forgotten to check the copyright dates), but that I hadn’t read any of the very literary things he thought were “strongly influential” until well after the first book had been published (some of them had in fact not been written until after the first book was out), and that if anything was an influence on those books, it was the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons of my childhood. He was not terribly happy to hear this.

The last category is the folks who sell how-to-write systems. I don’t mean how-to-write books; many of those are fairly prescriptive, but it’s not a requirement. I haven’t seen any how-to-write systems that don’t have a series of steps you’re supposed to follow. There’s some flexibility, but a lot less than it looks like. There’s one, for instance, that starts with a lot of questions about the main character; you can answer them for some other character first, and get around to the main character later, but eventually, you’re expected to have character sketches for all your central characters (and each of them is supposed to fit into a particular role: protagonist, antagonist, mentor, etc.) before you start working on the plot.

And the thing that all these systems have in common is that they focus on the pre-writing stage. This is reasonable, in a way – developing an idea into a story can take time and attention, and it’s easy for one piece to get lost in the shuffle. People are often not sure how to do it, so having a structure can help. The pre-writing development is also one of the few places in the writing process where it is possible to construct a plausible series of steps for someone to follow. One can construct a series of steps for producing a scene, but it is obviously very mechanical, and it’s equally obvious that very few writers work that way. It’s not plausible.

Getting back to the writing systems – the problems are that 1) pre-writing can vary just as much as any other part of the process, so it’s a toss-up whether any particular system will work for any particular writer, and 2) prescriptive systems that depend on getting a lot of stuff decided and down on paper in advance can be actively detrimental to at least two sorts of writer: the seat-of-the-pants writer who works best when they make things up as they go, without planning, and the tell-it-once-only writer for whom telling the story once in any form (including outlining) kills it dead and prevents them fro writing anything at all.

It’s not the method that makes the difference; it’s the match-up between the writer and the method.