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.
Published on June 14, 2017 07:52
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.