My Seat-of-the-Pants Writing Process



Writer friends, does the following resonate? This seemed like such an apt description of my own creative process (from Dennis Lehane's SINCE WE FELL): 

There seemed to be little rhyme or reason as to why one day snatching the correct words from the ether was like opening a faucet and other days it was like opening a vein, but she began to suspect both the good and the bad parts of the process were connected to the fact that she was writing without a map. No plan at all, really. She fell quite naturally, it seemed, into a more free-flowing approach than she ever would have allowed herself as a journalist and gave herself over to something she didn’t quite understand, something that, at the moment, spoke in cadence more than structure.
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Published on June 14, 2017 07:52
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message 1: by Chip (last edited Jun 16, 2017 10:19PM) (new)

Chip Howell The problem with a lot of what contemporary writers (and readers) have is that they forget that fiction isn't real, and yet it shares ONE thing with reality (not realism) and that one thing is: it's improvised. If you plot out a story and stick rigidly to that plot, you're not writing fiction, you're writing journalism in drag; that's pure torture for both the writer and the reader. In reality, you never know what's going to happen, and so it stands to reason that the writing process follows the same pattern. I suppose this is why a lot of "serious" fiction is so rigid and un-read while all of the greatest works of literature are organic and kinda messy, no matter how "realistic" or "outrageous."

As for me, if I prevent a story from developing on its own, I'm won't be surprised by it. If I'm not surprised by it, readers won't be either. This doesn't mean that I have no idea where the story is going or how its going to get there, but for me, the whole writing process is an exercise in backtracking and solving the mystery of how things got to a particular point. Or sometimes it's just being inspired by misreading a street sign.


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