How I Write

Everyone’s an expert these days; it’s marketing 101. We all want that certainty; an explanation of how to do something so we can follow it step by step.

So we have writers explaining how to outline, or how not to outline. There are prescribed steps (even for not outlining) that you must follow. If you don’t, then, according to the expert, you must be wrong.

The problem is that they’re selling to people who will likely fade from writing over the long term. There are a lot of writers looking for the easy steps to become a best seller, or to write full time so they can quit the day job (read: kick back and not work).

The others, like me, like you…we might hear the same advice and get messed up by it. I spent years struggling with my writing because it seemed like every writer declared, “You must outline.” Now the pendulum has swung the other way, presumably because so many pantsers were told to outline. Now you hear you must start writing from a blank page. So if you’re in between, a plantser like some writers bill themselves, you’re informed that you’re doing pantsing wrong.

It’s like there’s a battle out there for control of how you write.

It also astounds me because it shouldn’t matter.

After hearing writers mansplaining that I was completely wrong about writing, I always felt like saying, “I wish you could see inside me head.”

So…this is how I write…

I’m not saying anyone else should do it my way. Part of it may not be replicable. I can only be the expert of me.

First, I can’t outline. At all. If I try to map out my story, or even just figure out the ending like Michael Connelly does, the story’s done.

That’s my Strategic side. I have six Strategic strengths in my top ten. Strategic needs to work out the story as it goes along. If I figure out the story in advance, I lose interest in it because, essentially, it’s already done. And I’ve been told, “No, no. Outlines don’t work that way.” For that person. Everyone forgets that.

Doesn’t matter what format of outline. Plot points, Marshall Plan, you name it. Same across the board. How do I know? I have tried outlining. Haven’t finished a single story by doing it.

Also means I can’t figure out character arcs or do character worksheets (which is like outlining a character).

I also can’t do Writing in the Dark. That’s the brainchild of Dean Wesley Smith. Works for a lot of writers and for a while I thought it was the answer to all the nonsense against pantsers. It’s hard when you hear only one thing from everyone else and glorious when you find out you’re not alone.

But I can’t do most of what Writing in the Dark prescribes, mainly because it’s a method that works for Dean Wesley Smith and whatever his strengths are. I can’t just type the next word until I finish the story. Nor can I cycle by moving back 500 words. Nor can I create a reverse outline (done after you write the scenes). I am glad WITD is out there. Pantsers needed a voice because the outliners were stifling people who couldn’t outline. Every time I saw a blog post labeled “Reformed pantser,” I wondered if that person was writing anymore.

Chances are the way you started writing is probably how you write, though it may alter. One of the things I discovered in the last few years was that I need to think about the story. The thinking can occur multiple ways: while taking a walk, or thinking on paper.

The outliners would say I was outlining in my head and just not calling it an outline (what is with trying to label everything as outlining anyway?). The pantser crowd says I’m immersing myself in myths and letting the inner critic in because I’m not doing pantsing correctly. Seems like they both think I’m doing outlining.

And it’s neither. I’m just running through in my head different ideas of how to open the story. It’s all fleeting, and I may use none of it. Just the thought process to get to being able to open the story. I remember asking how to open a story—something that had been broken for me with bad writing advice—and he just said, vaguely, “Just start the story.”

My typical process prior to learning I needed to think about the story first was to create redraft after redraft of the opening before I moved on. In hindsight, I was thinking my way into the story. When I started Superhero Vs. Superhero, I spent about a week walking around and running through different scenarios in my head. Suddenly, I felt settled, and I could start the story.

As I write, my brain fires off like a pinball machine. It makes connections at different points in the story. If it hit Chapter 6 and realize I need to change a line early, I know exactly where it is and I jump back to fix it. No matter where I am in the story, I can do this.

This is how I cycle, or moving around, as I’ve called it (for lack of a name). I don’t fix the last 500 words, which makes no sense to me. I fix issues in the section my brain connects back to.

This is also why I can’t reverse outline. I remember everything in the story because of those connections. I don’t need to write it down on a piece of paper to keep track. It also explains why other random things like character lists don’t work for me.

So I write, I think, then I write some more. And I bounce all over the story. The actual writing does need to be in the correct sequence. If I try to jump ahead and write a later scene, I always toss it. The pinball machine firing off never includes that scene, for whatever reason. It only goes backwards. Research is done on the spot. Trying to do it before the story implies I know what I’m going to need, which isn’t true because I haven’t outlined. Depending on where I am in the story, I may write notes to research later. That may include things I need to think about. Sometimes a bit of description doesn’t come to me right away (this has been something I’ve needed to learn to accept. Unfortunately, on the pantser side of writing, it’s common to see writers talking about letting your subconscious put everything down. The result was that I got stuck more often because I had to stop and figure out something that I might fix easily in a day or two).

World building is also on the spot. I don’t build it before I write the story because I don’t know what I need until I need it. I pay a continuity editor to build a story bible. Otherwise, I just hop back into the story to see what a particular fact is. For years, I stayed away from speculative fiction because too many writers said that you had to build the world before you wrote the story. Ugh.

When I reach the climax of the story, I do a cycle of the entire book. Mostly just clean up of orphaned stuff. Those are things that my brain put in, thinking I might do something with it, and then the story went in a different direction. Some writers would say that my subconscious put that in for a reason, so I should leave it in. But I pinball so much in the story that those pieces stand out because they don’t fit anywhere.

Yeah, it’s kind of an out there process, but it’s what works for me.

We all need to be able to say “This is how I write” without others lecturing us that we’re doing it wrong.