The Middle Way
I pantsed the heck out of my first romance novel. I had an idea, thought about it for a while, scratched out a one-page outline, and wrote a thousand words a day until it was done. This was the sum total of what I knew about the structure of a romance novel before I started, all gleaned from reading sixty of them in four months: In the first half, the characters are unable to get together due to lots of external circumstances. Around the halfway mark, they have sex. At about the three-quarters mark, something goes terribly wrong, and at about nine-tenths mark, someone commits a great act of heroism and rescues everything. It wasn’t a lot—I was missing the whole idea of goal-motivation-conflict, not to mention just about everything I needed to know about how to write a beginning—but it was apparently enough.
When I wrote my second novel, I decided I was going to plot it to within an inch of its life. I used Karen Wiesner’s First Draft in Thirty Days, and I knew absolutely everything about what was going to go into that novel—what the characters wore to bed, what would happen in scene fifty-four, the exact words in which the hero would propose to the heroine. That novel came out okay, too, but not good enough that I actually wanted to revise it and try to sell it.
I worried that plotting had killed the second novel, so I immediately started pantsing the third, and I got about 30,000 words into it before I realized that I could never go back to the pantsy state in which I wrote my first novel. I was just too innocent back then. I’ve learned more now, most notably that I am not much for extremes. I like to know a fair amount about what I’m doing before I do it—it reduces my anxiety. But I don’t like to know too much about what I’m doing before I do it, either, because that takes all the fun out of it. So I think I need to write my novels using “middle way” —some plotting, some pantsing.
I’ve had the same problem finding a middle way between sprinting through drafts and getting stuck and fussy. I wrote the second book in a series of sprints, and when I was all done, I realized that it is monumentally difficult to deal with 90,000 completely unedited words. If something has gone mildly awry in chapter 3, it has turned into a literary catastrophe by the black moment.
So then I tried to generate a cleaner manuscript, only to find that I was so busy polishing that I’d forgotten to write.
A long email conversation with Ruthie Knox reminded me of the middle way: Ruthie writes by making at least two passes—an initial writing-only, non-fussy one and several additional ones with intensifying degrees of poking and fussiness. That method makes sure there’s time for both writer-brain (that freeform, delightful, where-the-magic-happens sprint-for-the-finish experience) and editor-brain (where reason sets in and you get yourself back on track before proceeding).
I’m grateful to have the time and space for experimentation with process, because apparently, I’m a bit of a glommer-on—I hear about a technique or a method or a way of thinking about things, and I grab onto it like it’s going to save me. My challenge going forward is to remember that there’s probably another way that’s diametrically opposed to the one I just latched onto, and that my way, which is the only way that matters, is somewhere in the middle.
January 18, 2012 @ 3:26 pm
No, no — my method will save you!
Just kidding. The thing I try to become comfortable with — so far with limited success — is that no book is going to go exactly like the one before. They all seem to require their own process, and that’s anxiety-provoking but nonetheless okay. I see more experienced writers saying this sometimes — that one book will be so easy it practically writes itself, another a horrific, doubt-filled slog, but readers can’t tell the difference. It doesn’t show in the outcome. Maybe the trick is not finding the right process but finding the peace emotionally to accept that there isn’t one.
January 18, 2012 @ 7:40 pm
This is so true. I wish the books would all get together and discuss how to be a well-behaved manuscript, but this doesn’t seem to be in the cards. It also makes it really hard to know when (or if) to give up on one that’s sucking all the life out of you. Maybe it’s doing that because you don’t know enough of the piece yet, or maybe it’s just doing that because it’s that kind of difficult book to write.
January 18, 2012 @ 6:19 pm
I have more limited writing experience, but I will say that it seems that once you go plotting, you can’t go back. But this is a good thing, at least for me. There are certain aspects of writing that come easier to certain people. There are things I like to think I am good at, like voice or maybe characterization, and some of the “how to” information on those topics just seem obvious. But I suck at plotting. I am the village idiot of plotting, having no innate talent and only a very surface understanding of it after having read several books about it, so deliberate plotting according to story structure is a very important step for me.
January 18, 2012 @ 7:42 pm
I hear you. I have a lot of trouble looking at the various plotting tools (six-part this and three-act that and story-evolution worksheet blah blah blah) and making them correspond, remotely, to what’s in my head. I think (I hope) that part must get easier. In the meantime, I try to hammer what I know into the molds as best I can and hope that some combination of that and writerly instinct will get me by.