What you want and what you need

For a writer, stories start in all sorts of places. Sometimes, it’s a headline that makes you think “If that had happened a little sooner, or in a different place, or to someone who wasn’t a celebrity…” or “What happens if they keep doing this?” Sometimes it’s a snatch of a song or a line from a poem. Sometimes it’s a place that makes the writer think “This would be a perfect spot for a murder, or an alien invasion, or a true love meetup.” Sometimes it’s the face of a person on the street or in a photo, or a news story about a new discovery, or a bit of historical trivia, that triggers a writer’s “I have to do something with that!” reflex.

But there is one thing that all those idea-triggers and story-starts have in common at least 99.9% of the time, regardless of whether the writer is analytical or intuitive, whether they wing it or plan it, whether they write C-grade pulp adventure fiction or highbrow literature.

They’re incomplete.

The “I have to do something with this!” writer-reaction implies, right there in the middle of it, that there is still something to do. Unfortunately, the way fiction writing has been talked about and taught for the past hundred years or so has convinced most people that “what still needs to be done” is simply to write it down, as if the writer is taking dictation from some inspiring supernatural force. If that were all we had to do, the most important skill for a writer to possess would be typing speed.

Part of the problem is that “what still needs to be done” varies wildly from writer to writer. True seat-of-the-pants types can fill in the missing parts so fast that it really does look as if they’re taking dictation; the extreme planners at the other end of the spectrum may need a 400-page “outline” and 500 pages of notes and character bible in order to write a 300-page novel.

Most of us are somewhere in the middle – and there’s a lot of middle between those two extremes. The real difficulty is figuring out where one falls in that very wide range of possibilities. This is usually a process of trial and error, complicated by the fact that many of us have a comfort level and a work/discipline level that is not the same as the level we actually need to be at in order to get to our writing optimum.

By comfort level, I mean the amount of information we think we need to have about the story, the world, or the characters in order to do a good job of writing it. Some writers are so worried about making continuity errors or making “flat” characters that they aren’t comfortable unless they have a scene-by-scene outline and a large character bible before they ever start writing… even if they’re really more of a “wing it” type at heart. Others are so worried about tying the story down too soon that they are uncomfortable with any description that’s more than a log line or a couple of paragraphs, even if they really need at least a ten or twenty page outline to be going on with.

This is complicated by the fact that, for some people, doing the planning is the fun part (so they want to keep working on it until they have a Tolkienesque stack of notes and outlines and backstory, whether they need it or not), while for others, the prewriting is a horrible chore (so they want to do as little as humanly possible, even if not having it means that writing the story is twice as hard and takes three times as long as it would if they’d done some advance preparation).

In other words, what a writer wants to know before they sit down at the page is often very different from what he or she needs to know in order to start writing and keep writing. Sometimes, this is merely inconvenient; a writer may spend a lot of time and effort writing a 400-page story bible that they don’t really need, but the only real effect on the work is that it gets started a lot later than it otherwise would have. Or a writer who wants to get started right now, not realizing they need more information, may stall at some point when they have to stop and make up some new stuff, but they do so and the only effect is a loss of momentum and, again, slower production than would otherwise be the case.

For other writers, a discrepancy between what they want to know and what they need to know can be fatal to the production or quality of the story. The writer who believes they need a huge story bible may get tired of the characters long before the “background notes” are finished, and give up the work entirely, or may have told so much of the story that they have no interest in telling it again as a manuscript. The writer who hates doing any prep may stall out so many times due to lack of thinking through the background that they give up halfway through the story.

This is where the work/discipline level comes in. Whether one is the sort of writer who really needs to do more up-front idea development (even though it’s a chore), or the sort who needs to stop doing idea development and/or research and get on with writing the story, it takes discipline and work to make oneself do (or stop doing) the prewriting. It also take some honesty and a willingness to step outside one’s comfort zone: honesty about how well one’s comfortable work habits have worked in the past (How many stories have you abandoned in the middle because the next plot or character developments were totally opaque? How many because you lost interest because everything was already decided and “too predictable”? How often do you have to stop six or twelve chapters in to do some more research, make up a new character, or invent more details of the background or backstory? How often do you actually refer to all those pre-story notes, and when you go back, is it to actually check something, or is it always to change something that’s morphed as the story has been written?) and a willingness to test-drive an alternative process to find out whether it works for you or not.

Because the other thing about what you want to know versus what you need to know is that sometimes, it isn’t worth the discomfort and effort of forcing oneself to do more (or less) prewriting even though in some sense it “works better.” You may be perfectly capable of winging it for 80,000 words, but if it makes you terribly uncomfortable, why force yourself? Writing is hard enough as it is.