Improvisation

I was talking to 15 about the process of writing. It has surprised me how often it is useful to use a different creative arts metaphor to help me understand myself. I asked 15 if when she wrote a song, she was basically transcribing a melody in her head. At first, she said that she was, and couldn't figure out any other way that it could be done. But later she admitted that she sometimes hears accompaniment for a song first, and then sits at a piano and works out a melody to go with it. Or she will sometimes have a feeling she wants to evoke or a song she wants to steal a piece from and then she will improvise around it.

Improvising is perhaps the best description ever of what I do when I write. I have previously been using "outliners" and "pantsers" as terms describing the two ends of the spectrum, but improvising is much better. It explains some of the reasons why I had such difficulty writing in the early stages of my career, for example. I simply did not understand the inner rules of STORY as I do now. I didn't know what chords I could put together, so to speak. I didn't know how to evoke the feeling I wanted to evoke. Now that I do, that doesn't mean that my first improvisation is the right one, but it does mean that my improvisations are of a completely different level now than they used to be.

I sit down and I know what to do to put together a scene that fills this part of the plot, that moves the plot to the next position, that has characters developing in the way that they need to. I can play with variations on how to move certain pieces on the board to the climactic moment. There is always a climactic moment, and I may always know what that moment will be, but everything around that moment can change. The characters are the same characters in some essential way in every draft I write, and yet they may do completely different things, may be in scenes that have nothing to do with other scenes I have written for them.

Another thing that 15 and I discussed was the possibility of writing a great song (or a perfectly good one) without having had any training in theory at all. We both know this has been done. We've heard songs or read books by people who don't seem to know the rules. But the art works anyway. The only problem is that in many cases, the artists, because unaware of the rules, are unable to produce a second book. (Sophomore novel syndrome anyone?) Of course, it can be done. It just isn't as easy as the first novel was, because the first novel/song was a completely fluke.

When I sit down to write a novel now, I have an idea of what I want to do. Sometimes it is stealing something from another book. I think I want to write a romance that has the snappy dialog of Pride and Prejudice, for example, or I want to evoke the feeling of loss that I get when there is a new Dr. Who. It doesn't really matter if the potential reader of my novel knows my source or not. Sometimes a publisher will decide to make it obvious what I am doing, sometimes not. But the spark matters for me. I can test my work against that spark and try to figure out if I am doing my improvisation "right" or not if it does what I imagined it would do.

Other times, I start writing a book and it turns in my hands into something else. I think improvisation is a good word to describe that, as well. An improvisation can take you in a different direction and then you may end up polishing it up and erasing the first parts that took you where you ended up. I had that happen with The Princess and the Hound,which I originally thought was a retelling of The Princess and the Pea.