For purposes of this post, I’m defining “the writing process” as “how people go about getting words on the page.” Not getting ideas, not developing them, not laying down plot or characterization, though all of those things are involved or affected by process. (Writing is a massive tangled yarn ball that six kittens have been playing with for a month.) Just how the words get down on paper.
The first thing to recognize is that each individual writing process is different because it’s like doing audio mixing on a fancy machine with a bunch of slider buttons. Each slider can be set anywhere along a range, so even if there are only a couple of sliders, you end up with 47 gazillion possible individual combinations.
The slider-bars I’ve come up with based on my own writing process and that of other writers I’ve met look something like this:
- Planner to pantser. At one end are those planners who write a 500-page outline plus 800 pages of background notes in order to write a 300-page novel. At the other are the seat-of-the-pants writers who sit down and wing it. Naturally, hardly anyone is at these pure extremes. Most of us are in the middle somewhere, doing some amount of planning and prewriting and some amount of composing on the fly. If it’s a 100-point scale, I’m probably around 50, because I do a lot of planning…but then I do a lot of ignoring it when I have a cool idea in the middle of writing.
- Plodder to burst writer. Plodders write a bit every day, day in and day out, no exceptions. On any given day, it isn’t much, but even 100 words every single day gets you around 110,000 words every three years, which is a perfectly respectable output, especially if one has a day job. Burst writers work in chunks, slamming down a massive quantity of words in a few days or weeks, then not writing anything for a while. My tentative observation is that the greater the quantity of words produced in a writing burst, the longer the fallow period between bursts tends to last, so that average words-per-year ends up about the same as a plodder produces. This may be a function of small sample size and/or anecdotal evidence. On a 100-point scale, I’d say I work best toward the plodder end of the scale; if that’s zero, then I’d rate my best production at around 15-20.
- Linear to non-linear. The most linear writers start writing on page 1 of their story and write in order through to The End, whether the story itself is told in order or not. The most non-linear writers pile up bits and pieces—scenes, conversations, chapters—in whatever order they happen to feel like writing them, and then move them around until they form some kind of progression. If linear is the zero point, I was probably around a 3 for the first five or six books I wrote, but I’ve gradually moved a tiny bit toward the middle over the course of my career. Now I’d give myself somewhere between 5 and 10 as my normal comfort zone.
- Time-focused to task-focused. Time-focused writers are sharply aware of how much time they spend writing and/or when they spend it. Sometimes this is out of necessity—that early morning half-hour before the kids get up is the only time they have. Sometimes, they’ve learned from experience that they work best at a certain time of the day or night, or that their creative juice wears out after an hour of work and if they push it they end up unable to write for a week. Task-focused writers focus on what or how much, rather than on time. They sit down to write a scene or a chapter or a conversation, and when they finish it, they’re done for the day, whether it took them 5 hours or 15 minutes. When I started writing, and for a long time thereafter, I’d say I was around 75, toward the task-focused end of the scale. I set words-per-day production goals and stayed up late to make them if I had to. At present, I’m more time-focused, so I’d currently give myself around a 35.
- Exogenous vs. endogenous. While the other sliders are about the way an individual writer’s mind works, this one is more about how much impact external circumstances have on all the other aspects. For instance, a writer who has small children is pretty much forced to be a time-focused writer, whose best writing time is whenever the kids are napping, regardless of how they’d prefer to write if they had no other considerations. Writers who have a demanding day job can be in a similar situation. Limited writing time can also force a burst writer to plod along, simply because they can’t put in five or ten or sixteen hours a day, even on weekends. Day jobs that involve a series of demanding projects can force a plodder to write like a burst writer. And so on.
All of these slider bars mix and match independently. Furthermore, they change over time. They often change from one book to the next. They can change within a book—for example, the writer who is a task-focused, nonlinear plodder for the first 60,000 words of a book, piling up random scenes at a steady two-to-four pages per day and occasionally linking them together, but who sits down at some point, puts everything in order, and then finishes up in a one-week, 50K-word burst. And they can, of course, change due to changes in circumstances.
Fortunately, even if one has a preference for one end of the slider over the other, most writers can learn to work another way, at least to some extent, particularly when there is no other choice. “No other choice” comes in at least two flavors: first, when your backbrain hands you a book that insists on being written from a different spot on one or more of the sliders; second, when circumstances change such that the process has to adjust if anything is going to get written at all (see #5, above).
Figuring out where one’s sweet spot is on different sliders, is a matter for experimentation. There Is No One True Way.
I think I’m pretty close to the middle on sliders 1 and 2. I’m not super big on plotting (I most certainly DO NOT write outlines for my stories), but if I don’t know where I’m going, the story peters out and dies before it’s really gotten moving. I try to do some writing every day, but sometimes there are days when I a) don’t have time to write because of school constraints, b) don’t have the brainpower to write because I overdid it recently, or c) both of the above.
On the other hand, I’m pretty close to both the “linear” side of slider 3 (though maybe not *quite* to that extreme) and the “time-focused” side of slider 4. As for slider 5, it changes depending on my schedule :).
An additional variable is when the planning is done. The stereotypical planner does all the planning before beginning to write, but there are those of us who plan in the middle. E.g. finish writing a chapter and then stop and plan out the next chapter before writing it.
I pile up snippets and scenes until a story coalesces, then massively plan, no outline, as I’m an extreme nonlinear writer. Then burst write health permitting, otherwise plod, and start making piles again with scene my current task unit. The sliders do move a lot as needed.
Burst writing has the danger that the fallow periods can be so long you don’t come back to writing.
Be sure that’s not you before you give up plodding.
I think the key is how you use fallow periods. Proactively refill your well and feed your inspiration and continue to think about writing. It isn’t inherently more dangerous to write in bursts.
One of the dangers of plodding for me is I lose some of the material I can’t get down fast enough, but I’d never advise people who dream stories to fast to avoid the plodding because of it. I’d advise them to be mindful of how they capture that material short of writing it all down in a burst.
Planner to pantser: If planning is zero, I’d say I’m about an 80. I absolutely do not outline, and the couple of times I’ve tried it hasn’t gone well, but I do want to have some idea of where I’m going, in a very broad, 50,000-foot view way. And as Deep Lurker suggests, I will sometimes stop in the middle and plan out the next bit; historically, chapter 7 of a 15-20 chapter novel has often gotten something that looks very like an outline. But for the vast majority of a book, and even more for short stories, the words appear in my head; my job is to get those words out through my fingers and into the keyboard to make room for the next words, and whatever those words say is what the story is.
Plod-ish? Burst-ish? Either I write in small (usually <1K) bursts several times a week, or I plod in long strides, writing variable amounts but with a target minimum several times a week. I used to do something that I could have claimed was burst writing if I'd known that term then, but really it was just a whole lot of not-writing.
I've trained myself to be a fairly linear writer. I used to be extremely non-linear, but what happened was that I'd always write all the fun bits of a novel as they came to me, and then I'd have a pile of disjointed bits and be faced with the tedious task of writing all the connective tissue — and I didn't wanna, so nothing ever got finished. I will certainly jump ahead and write a scene or a bit of a scene if the words come to me, as they not-infrequently do, but as a general rule I've learned to start at the beginning and proceed through to the end.
Task-focused all the way. For me it's typically word-count rather than story-piece, but I will sit down and write until I hit my target word-count or until the word-reservoir in my brain runs dry, whichever comes second. I am entirely capable of staring at a screen for hours on end without producing anything, so for me a time-based metric would not be a good choice.
I mostly write on my days off, but I'm lucky enough to combine a part-time day job with very flexible freelance work, so days off can usually be arranged. Which does not stop the brilliant ideas and overflowing word-reservoir from happening when I'm rushing through a shower before dashing off to work, but that's brains for you.
“I’d always write all the fun bits of a novel as they came to me, and then I’d have a pile of disjointed bits and be faced with the tedious task of writing all the connective tissue”
Gosh – I can’t identify with that at all [cough!]
Too often I feel like I combine the worst aspects of a plodder and a burst writer.
As for linear vs non-linear, I’m on the extreme linear end, unless you count rolling rewrites as “non-linear.” When someone speaks of writing disconnected scenes and then stringing them together like beads, there’s an impolite part of me that wants to cry “Madness!” A less-impolite version might be “To me, it sounds like knitting a sock with one’s toes – and I don’t know how to knit at all.”
What a delightful visual!
I think of it more as a patchwork quilt. Or you know backstory where nothing is backstory. I consume media out of order due to getting things bought patchwork as a child and people still watch prequels and things released out of in canon order. It’s just, that’s my default instead of my backup position.
1. Planner to pantser: On the pantser side. I have to know where the story ends before I start, and I’ll sometimes do a rough list of things that have to happen, but I don’t do a strict outline. (Though see 3.)
2. Plodder to burst: Burst. I plod daily within a specific project, but once it’s finished, it’s going to be weeks or months before I have the brainpower to start something new.
3. Linear to non-linear: Non-linear. Even in a short story I’ll write bits out of order, and for a novel I’ll have a file of scenes that I know happen somewhere in the story. For me, this seems to take the place of the outline; once I’ve written the things that I know happen, I have enough structure to write in the in-between scenes. Yes, sometimes those in-between scenes are harder to write, but sometimes they give me the fun of solving a mystery — how do the characters get from Scene F to Scene G?
4. Time vs. task focus: More time-focused; not sure how much is natural and how much is necessity.
5. Exogenous vs. endogenous: Very much exogenous. I have life commitments that take priority over writing, so when I do write it’s fit in between those. I can see the end in sight and a time when I may have brainspace to write more, but I’m not there yet.