Spinning A Yarn

It has been a frustrating couple of weeks. Just when I was getting back into the swing of things, I got sick and everything ground to a halt. It’s frustrating enough to be restricted in how much I can do every day due to chronic illness ( I have Fibromyalgia and Crohn’s Disease) but this time I got sick by trying a new medication in the hopes it would make me feel better. Seems an unnecessary way to learn the meaning of irony.

But I’m writing again, and although after just a couple hours today am feeling in dire need of a nap, I’m making good progress on my novel and enjoying the story immensely.

I always feel like the first reader of my stories, along with being the writer. I write in such a way that I discover the story as I go along, feeling wonder and anticipation at the characters and the storyline just as if I were a reader.

My partner Jae and I have been talking quite a bit about writing methodology lately – in fact she just posted a blog on this very topic, and we’ve had some very interesting discussions. And although I understand the way she writes, now, and it sounds such a lot of fun to do it like that, it still baffles me completely.

She and I have two very different methods of writing. As I’m typing this, I can see she has just done a groovy, coloured chart of all her plot points, a sort of mind map, with lots of arrows and connections. She writes scenes from all over the book, in an order I can’t determine and likens it to quilting where pieces of the fabric of the story are patched together to make a whole cloth. It seems a very technical way of doing things, and I’m fascinated by it, but if someone were to sit me down and insist that I copy this method, I’d be completely stumped. How would I write a scene from the middle of the book, or the end, when I don’t know what happens before that?

I don’t build my stories the way Jae does, I excavate them. That’s the closest I can come to explaining how the process works for me. It feels like my main job is to get out of my own way when I want to write and just let the story manifest itself. I’m almost convinced, when I sit down to write, that even though all I really know is something about the main character, and something about what I want to happen to her, in reality the story is there already, nearly complete in some back room of my creative conscious and all I have to do is throw open the curtains and dust it off – one word at a time. It’s scary stuff, to have to have that level of trust in your own process to just get out of the way and let go, but it’s also totally exhilarating.

I know, when I sit down to write each day, what the next scene will be basically about – although there have been too, I admit, quite a number of times when I’ve sat down with no idea at all – but I’m always surprised at what turns up. The characters say and do things I never consciously thought of, they veer off into areas I’d never considered, circumstances change beyond my intention.

In other words, I’m writing blind. I start at the beginning of the book, the very first sentence and the story unfolds under my fingers. I start with a character and a situation, a glimmer of an idea about what I want to happen, and a dim possibility of the ending, and that’s it. The rest comes during the process of writing, the actual process of typing words onto the page. I don’t even go back and make changes while I’m writing. It’s long been a mystery to me how I can include foreshadowing in a story for a plot line I had no idea of at that time, and which doesn’t become apparent until significantly later in the story – and yet that’s the way it happens. Neither do I read the story over while I’m writing, except the last couple of paragraphs to remind myself where I’m up to.

There’s no way I could sit down and plot a story, no way I could start anywhere but the beginning, no way I could weave together disparate scenes, consciously looking for connections between them. I kinda wish I could – it sounds fun, to do all that work in the front of my mind where I can see it, and I think it would be a very exciting way to write, consciously pulling everything together – what a feeling of satisfaction that must give! But I only have to spend a moment considering it to know it just wouldn’t work for me.

I love the sense of mystery in the way I work. I love never knowing what really is going to come next.

And how it always seems to work out.

Filed under: Writing Journal