Every writer has something – some part of writing, however tiny – that comes easily (or at least, more easily than the rest of it). For some it’s action scenes; for others, it’s deep characterization; for others it’s plot or dialog or structure or theme. But there’s always something.
What this means is that, for the first couple of stories or novels or X-many-thousand words, one can safely ignore the freebie and concentrate on learning all the other stuff that one didn’t get for free. More than that — in my experience, what one gets for free comes so easily and naturally that “ignoring it” is too strong a phrase. It’s like saying a fish ignores water, or that people ignore air.
But sooner or later, if they keep working at their craft, every writer hits a point where they can’t just coast on natural talent in that area any more. Suddenly they have to work at it. The easier and more natural it was, the bigger the shock when it becomes obvious that from here on, it’s going to take work to do this bit…and the harder it is to figure out techniques and tricks for doing what they’ve never had to think about before. Like the centipede trying to figure out which leg to move first.
If you’re lucky, you will have realized what the thing is that you got for free long before you get to the point where you have to start working on it. That gives you the chance to start thinking about what you’re doing, instead of doing it all by instinct, so that it isn’t such a shock when you get to the need-to-work-at-it point. (Of course, some folks don’t think about it even then, and so they get hit by the semi-trailer truck anyway.)
The corollary to this idea, of course, is that every writer has something that for them is really, really hard to do. But I think that’s a different post.
The easy part – dialogue. I actually get to know my characters through dialogue – what they say, what they don’t or wouldn’t say…
The difficult part – expostition. Hate it – and it shows, unfortunately. (At least, I can tell.)
The impossible part – plot. I’ve decided just not to bother.:)
For me, the easy part has always been the technical craft of writing itself–the grammar, the punctuation, the sentence structure, the usage and mechanics, etc. From a technical standpoint, I write by instinct, and 99% of the time my first draft is my only draft (and has often earned me exceptionally high grades and praise from even the most notoriously hard-to-please professors when I was in college).
The hard part? Everything else. 😛
–Jennifer
I probably should have said – what I got free was structure and, to some extent, plot. I con’t think I can properly claim grammary, punctuation, and syntax as a freebie, not after the way my grade-school teachers worked to pound them into us!
I… er, don’t know what I get for free. I’m not sure what the really, really hard part is either. The more I write, the less I seem to know about what I’m doing. ::sigh::
I think what I got for free is suspense. Not action -action is tough- but the way tension is drawn out just before the action happens. If I could do non-stop tension and forget about making it lead to anything, I’d be golden.
I get character. Everything else is hard.
Not sure what’s for free in writing, for me.
In teaching, I thought I would be great at explaining, but, SURPRISE! the freebie was classroom management. Which completely weirded me out. And I found this out, furthermore, by having (multiple) other people observe and critique my teaching. I normally have a lot of faith in my own self-observational powers, but they completely failed me in this instance.
Historically, however, with both writing and teaching, one of the main keys to my development has been trusting my instincts about what is working and what isn’t, and then working like a dog at what isn’t. At the moment, I’m trying to work on my plotting/outlining, because lack of plot is what killed my first serious attempt at a novel. This time ’round, it’s being suspiciously easy, so I’m worried that something else is going to bite me as soon as I start working on other aspects of my writing. But I’m trying not to borrow trouble.
For me the free is the plotting and coming up with ideas. My muse and I have a great relationship and whenever I want to, we sit down together and come up with viable interesting stories.
The hard part? Writing the first draft. I’m an impatient person with perfectionist tendencies and putting the story-in-my-head down on paper is tedious and frustrating.
Of course that doesn’t stop me. 😉
Alex – Not stopping is really important! 🙂 And writing the first draft is the hardest part for an awful lot of the writers I know.
S.A.Cox – I think what you’re describing about classroom management is kind of what I meant when I said that what you get for free is often like air – it comes SO naturally that you don’t even SEE it. I thought for years that my freebie was plot, but now I think it’s actually deeper than that: it’s structure. Which I, too, had to have pointed out to me.
And I think I’m going to turn the rest of my response to this into another post. 🙂
My freebie: story. I’ve had a couple of clicheed ideas, and one of them might have turned into a decent novel, the other would have been a reasonable (if clicheed) short story. The hard stuff? Writing consciously.
When I came to the point where I had to work to improve a particular aspect of my writing – description – I found, to my dismay, that I had been doing _everything_ subconsciously, and dragging things into the open was a long, difficult, and ongoing process. (And thanks again for having so much patience.)
green knight – Hey, I learned a lot myself from that discussion! And the only problem I can see with being an intuitive writer is the one you fingered – getting to a point where the only way to improve some aspect of what you are (or aren’t) doing is to work at it consciously.
I miss those discussions 🙁
I had a look at the thread the other day to quote it, and boy, was it full of good stuff. I’m still not doing it intuitively, although I’m getting better at the ‘there’s a description-shaped hole in my story’ aspect.
One of the things that came out of the recent discussion is that I need to think about places and things in terms of motion- ‘what does it do’ rather than ‘what does it look like.’ And that I need to step back a step and visualise things even though I’m perfectly happy to exist in a non-visual space where I only know what the character interacts with directly.
Not in the least because quite often knowing what else is there, seeing the bigger picture, will, in turn, spawn more plot, or at least liven up the plot that’s already playing out. (For the current novel I cheated – two of the places I describe in detail were taken from reality; and boy did I ever get plot-relevant details that I would never have thought to invent.)
green_knight – Yeah, I miss ’em, too.
I don’t remember – is the motion thing the only one that really works well, or can you do sounds and smells and so on better than visuals, too? I seem to recall that when we finally got you doing descriptions, they were full of yummy non-visual details like the squishiness of the mud…but it’s been long enough that I don’t remember whether I’m mixing you up with one of the other folks who had trouble with description.
I’ve gone away and thought some more (and wrote a great bit more on my personal livejournal where enough writers hang out to get good, though short-lived discussions [drops heavy hints], and I think part of the problem is that my process involvs getting to know the story as it unfolds through the character’s eyes – so in first draft, I’m much more likely to write everything through the character’s eyes.
I am currently trying to adopt my process the WIP in which the setting plays a much greater role – and while I’m not happy with the words themselves, I think I’m getting the _scenes_ right. Visuals are hard to me. Visuals don’t have a meaning for me – they’re just one more detail, not where the story lies.