How We Write: Crunchy
Heads down in a three-quarters completed draft, I'm also coaching an author preparing for the same creative battle: making story and characters come alive by force of will and your imagination alone. My first comment to her–it's going to get crunchy. Don't expect a cake walk. In fact if it's not an all-out battle, you're not challenging yourself enough.
That's right. We write uneven and clunky and, yes, crunchy stuff when we're slogging through the draft. And for most of us, even those of us who've published novels into the double digits, it gets harder the more stories we challenge, not easier. That's the way it works. The more you learn about story, the more you decide to do with it, the less intuitive it can sometimes be to create what appears to be an effortless journey to the reader.
Several things cause the anxiety and mind-numbing tangents we encounter when we draft:
No planning. As I've explained to countless freelance clients, authors I'm editing, and those I've worked with through workshops, etc., the less planning you do before you write, the more you do WHILE you write. The result of the latter? Logic errors. Writing yourself into corners that you can't write out of. Crafting reactions or decisions that fit your plot but not your characters, or vise versa.
Inconsistent drafting schedule. If you don't stay in your evolving story (and mean every day, writing as much as you can, even if it's only a few paragraphs that take you further than the day before), you forget where the last story element left off. You don't remember the character arc you were riffing on. You start something new, in the midst of something else, in the midst of something else… Until you finally realize that your draft has resembles the pattern of a hyperactive grade schooler, ping-ponging all over the place, having fun here and there, with no overall direction whatsoever.
Premature revision anxiety. What you're writing isn't the way you want it, it's not the way you want anyone to read it, so you're not going to move on until it's perfect. Because that's what disciplined writers do. Actually, in my experience, that's what most writers do when they have years and years to write books. They stop and start, robbing their creativity of discovering what comes next in the flow and rhythm of the forward-moving story plot, so they can do the easier work of prettying up what they've already written. Because that feels safer for some of us. It certainly feels better than tackling another blank page. Except that new page might hold the answers you'll never know to the puzzle you've left to solve in the crunchy story behind you.
There are more stumbling blocks, but these are the high points I've seen in my own and others' processes over and over again.
Bottom line, we don't like things unresolved. Some of us have a much lower tolerance for it than others. Like me:
So, I developed a process of planning (through character) that better prepared me for the darkness of drafting, shining light into cobwebbed corners so I could see a bit more clearly as I slogged about.
And I taught myself over the years to trust my rewriting skills as one of my greatest strengths. The anxiety of whether or not I can rework a draft into something I'm not ashamed to share with an editor, let alone a reader, is long gone (well, not gone, but contained now without the need of mind-altering pharmaceuticals).
Finally, I hold myself to a work strict ethic when I'm drafting. I write forward. I don't write back. I can look back to get my barings and to make notes of things that need to be attended to once I'm done, because of changes I'm making in the overall character/story arcs as I move forward. But I do not, no exception, stop writing the next page because I can't stop myself from fiddling with the last one.
I've accepted that draft writing is just one of the three phases of the writing journey. For me, it's the shortest of the three. I plan and rewrite more than I draft.
Drafting for me is getting the bones of my plan fleshed out and on the page and realized in the living, breathing lives of my characters and plot turning points, so I can actually see what is is I've only been invisioning so far. Then I dig into all that crunchy stuff, once I've reached The End, and let loose the best of my creativity with every tool I have in my took belt: a solid plan, a solid (if imperfect) draft, and kick-butt revision technique.
But more importantly, how do you write crunchy?
How do you keep creating, when the doubt takes hold that what you've already done isn't good enough?
What's your process for staring into the eye of your weakest skill set and forcing yourself to not only do it until the job is done, but to do work with the kind of enthusiasm that will make you grow as writer, no matter how uncomfortable it feels?
