How We Write: Living the Book…
What challenges us emotionally in life, challenges our novel writing. What we're best at in life, becomes what we look forward to most in our writing process. I teach this dynamic all the time–and I live it. If you're a seat-of-the-pants writer, it wouldn't be a coincidence if you're not a list maker or a planner in the "real" world." If you LOVE to revise (like me), it's likely that analyzing things and breaking them into their orderly parts is you everyday zen (at least it's something that doesnt' drive you nuts the way it seems to for everybody else).
Flip that around. If the unknown scares you, and you tend to plan for likely outcomes before you embark on a journey, drafting a new novel won't make you warm and fuzzy (I tend to call the feeling a blank Page 1 invokes in me abject terror, but that might be a bit extreme for the rest of you.)
But if you're the wanderer, dreaming of a backpacking trip through Europe where you merely have a start point and a destination and you'll figure out pesky details like lodging and food and transpo along the way, well…you're nuts! Eh-hem. What I meant to say is that I suspect writing blind into a new story is a mighty lovely place for you. Until you hit The End, and have to go back and break things down into their parts, rework your rough draft pieces into a better whole, then knit everything back together (which anal retentive, geeky analytical girls like me tend to think of as Nirvana ;o).
My point to my students is never that either one or the other of these approahces is bad, in either life or writing. But that it's best to know your strengths and weaknesses and to play one up, while compensating for the other. If it takes you forever to write a draft (to the point that you revise and revise and revise your first 100 pages while never writing the rest of the novel), take a look at why. If you can't "make" yourself go back and revise a first draft because all the fun's gone out of the story for you now that you know how it ends, and the idea of working with it anymore makes you nauseous, take a look at why.
We make excuses for the broken parts of our writing processes. Excuses that in everyday life would impact our ability to do our jobs or run or families or keep our friends. In the "real" world, we learn to correct the personality traits (and control the emotions) that get in our way, so we can live better. Why, then, aren't most of us doing the same thing in our writing lives?
How to draft can be taught to any writer with a true gift for telling story through the written world. How to revise and deconstruct story and analyze its parts can be taught to any writer with the desire to actually publish the beautiful creation that is their rough draft.
The only real unknown is, how hard do you want to work on the internal life of your writing process? How honestly can you look at your strengths and weaknesses as a person, and the emotions that always come with challenging those weaknesses, no matter what you're doing? How determined are you to make your writing work and sellable, not just fun.
The fun will always be there–the part of this writing journey that you love best. So will the challenges. But once you decide to combine the two into whole–a well-rounded writer who's the entire package that a publisher, agent and reader are looking for–nothing can hold you back.
We live our books. We live our writing process. Our minds are creative, yes, and the artist's heart within us must be protected. But the writer's mind is also a tool that can be trained to overcome any challenge it faces–including the parts of us we don't like to look at any more closely in our writing than we do in our other lives.
"Look," I tell my students. "See what you are and what you're doing. Keep what works, fix the rest."
Life's just that simple.
