Two days ago, I wouldn’t have uttered those words, let alone written them. I’d been too afraid to commit to telling any kind of tale; every idea that entered my head felt too fleeting, too flimsy.
After coming out of edits on two books over the last couple years, and writing a mere…
34,525 words to a new book during National Novel Writing Month, I felt like a shriveled husk of creativity. I’ve got my bag of excuses of course–kids, work, Netflix, life. However, behind the scenes, I have been filling every spare moment with reading. Paper books, ebooks, and audiobooks. Every moment my hands are busy but my brain is free, I found myself plugged into an audiobook (currently: Under the Whispering Door by TJ Klune). This is because I have always felt that books provide knowledge and inspiration, the most important food groups for the writing kind. Thus, I find myself in an addictive relationship in which I feel if I can just read–well, everything, then I’ll be a better writer and a better human. I mean, yeah, it’s partially true, but at one point, you have to set the book down (and unplug the headphones) and live. Or in this case, daydream.
So after a veritable Mojave-like dryness of inspiration and drive, I happened to be washing dishes like a normie (i.e. no book being narrated directly into my earballs), and ideas for my November novel came pouring in. Are they genius ideas? No, just little snippets of scenes, glimpses at the characters’ minds, but this is the bread and butter of keeping a story alive in my imagination.
I realized I couldn’t expect to keep on filling every empty space with someone else’s words and have the work of daydreaming do itself. I was living in someone else’s final vision of the daydreaming into which they’d poured countless hours, days, months, maybe even years. I needed to give myself the breathing room to settle into the completely free-to-wander headspace I remember being able to call upon with ease as a child. Good old-fashioned staring into space fertilizes the ground to be struck with inspiration.
Next time I’m doing the dishes or checking the mail, I won’t take my phone with me, because I know now that my muse needs to run through empty fields.
Of course reading inspires, but do you think is it possible to read too much as a creative?What’s the first thing you change when the ideas stop coming?
God, it’s been a long time. I blame work mostly, but before that it was a general lack of inspiration. I was even flirting with the idea of just never updating this blog again, but for some reason, I couldn’t let it go. Now that I have actual thoughts to relay, I’m glad I didn’t. I don’t even know if anyone is still with me, here. Hello? Is thing on?
Anyway. Nanofreakinwrimo brings me out of my self-imposed hermitude. (I’ve dutifully transcribed my experience with this novel writing month here, here, and yes, here) Possibility is in the air. Do you feel it? Do you see how it breathes through the leaves on the shivering trees? Wait. Is it growling? Just me? Okay. So many ideas and current works-in-progress to dedicate myself to, and I just want to–do them ALL. My gothic work in progress, Wrathmoor, that I’ve been writing since 2011; my contemporary work in progress The Rosen Tales; and Other Points of Contention, which just makes me giddy and terrified every time I think about it; the short story I wrote for a contest that didn’t win, but that I love so hard I want it to have a face so I can pinch its cheeks; and the poem that is writing itself in my brain right now, revealing itself to me from the end going backwards, so yeah, that should be interesting.
This month makes me want that exhilaration of a cause and accomplishment and fighting tooth and nail to do the thing I love and what matters to me. I will never have an acceptable answer that “demonstrates critical thinking” or is particularly unique and especially meaningful for why I love writing and why writing these novels matters to me. Why does a child love painting and drawing? Why do we love to go to parties? Or, contrarily, why do we love to stay in and submerge ourselves in fanfiction? Just because I don’t have a textbook or Nobel worthy answer for why I love it, is it any less valuable?
No.
This life is too transient to get caught up in abstract, diaphanous terms like Meaning and Purpose in attempting to justify why we do the things we love. You get all tangled up in Plato’s Perfect Forms, and when you live in an imperfect world, it’s just not an ideal place to be, am I right? So, I say to you, my friends, on this day of new beginnings, of fresh, dewy eyed wonder, go. Find your horizon of possibility. Grasp its coat tails and let it carry you through the night.
Anyone else venturing into the great beyond with National Novel Writing Month? What will you be working on? Something new or something you’ve already started? I’m curious to hear how other people do NaNoWriMo: a little every day until you reach 50,000? Or just push yourself into the project with more gusto during this month of possibility?
This argument has been raging for centuries at least. I do not presume to tell anyone to change their process but to present the sides, devil’s-advocate style, and justify why I lean the way I do between these two. My prewriting, novel-planning method is in a constant state of flux as I try to pin it down and find what works best for me, so my goal is to present you with the sides and what I have learned of both approaches thus far.
To plot or not to plot…
In the article, “Revising your writing again? Blame the modernists” , Craig Fehrman writes that “during the 19th century, the Romantics made resisting revision a virtue. The best literature, they believed flowed from spontaneous and organic creative acts. ‘I am like the tyger (in poesy),’ Lord Byron wrote in a letter. ‘If I miss my first spring, I go growling back to my jungle. There is no second. I can’t correct.’ ” This is really the crux of the argument between these two approaches: organic composition is perceived by some to allow for freedom of the creative faculties where outlining inhibits that creativity. While this all-or-nothing mindset of Byron’s seems an extreme perspective, there are authors today that still seem to identify with this approach.
The organic method
In a 1992 Writer’s Digest article, Steven King says of his process,
“There’s no outline, nothing like that. That freezes it, it takes what should be a liquid, plastic, malleable thing to me and turns it into something else. Hey, to me it’s the difference between going to a canvas and painting a picture and going out and buying a Craftsmaster paint-by-the-numbers kit.”
This “paint-by-the-numbers” comparison probably derives from the assumption that is tidied up at the end of an outlined novel complete with a red ribbon; every loose thread is pulled together into what might seem to be a too tight braid. Life just isn’t like that—there are often loose threads never addressed again. While not all outlined novels have to feel stiff or too tidy, the opposing organic approach is King’s process and for him, it has paid off.
Another example of a successful writer sharing this perspective is the poet Robert Frost. In his essay “The Figure a Poem Makes”, he makes a valid point about artistic honesty and relevance to the human condition: “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” Again, this seems to have worked for the poet laureate.
Theoutlining method
At the opposite end of the spectrum from Stephen King and Robert Frost is John Grisham. According to Tony Vanderwarker, in an article written for WU, John Grisham is a stickler for an outline—but a good one. One you put your damn soul into. While Grisham is of an analytical mindset (accounting major and former law practitioner, as the article indicates), his strict outlining guidelines are invaluable. In most cases, the egoistic writer needs to hear Grisham’s advice regarding one’s initial outline draft (yes, multiple drafts of an outline may be required):
“Throw it out, start over…Takes too much ink to get it going.”
This simple, little statement has been in my brain since reading this WU post—and now you know how long I’ve been procrastinating on writing this blog post (Doh!). If you’re writing any type of modern novel, with the exception of maybe surrealist concepts or some short stories, you’re going to have to outline for a controlled, relevant flow of information. Even if you initially create organically, you will eventually go back through to do some cutting, rearranging, theme-searching (like soul-searching, but this one hurts), in short, revising/rewriting. As a novice, I never considered that everyone—anyone worth their salt at least—does this. But that I am no where near an expert no longer quite a novice, I have learned that very very few authors never reexamine their first draft, even fewer never change a word of their manuscript.
First novel–no outline
Second novel–with outline. Which is more well-known?
Outline now for revisions later
Revising and outlining go hand in hand, especially with regards to the charges laid against them; they are, after all, the more logic-driven, homework-feeling aspect of writing. Because of this logical aspect of both, outlining now can greatly assist in the revisions/rewriting that will come later. Once you take that raw, unformed idea that sprung forth from your head ready to take on the world like Athena from Zeus’s sick, sick mind, you have to mold it. It saves you time for you later to make sure your plot is on a track now, in the first go-around. Many would argue this, outlining, inhibits creativity. But
something to keep in mind about outlines is that you create them, and you can change them too.
But even then, it might still inhibit some. For me, someone who does not like thrashing in a sea of epistemological uncertainty, especially in the calling I have decided to invest my life in, it works. My own “outlining” is usually just future scenes written out in some rough order in which they’ll happen. But I will say that experimenting with more in-depth outlining for my rewrites and future novels, I have noticed a change in my work, in the direction in which it flows—more focused, less distracted. Middle-of-the-road outlining, as I have termed it, just means setting yourself up with a structure-awareness program as you go.
My critique partner and best friend, OstiumUnity, pretty much outlined her latest novel, Undertow, scene by scene. While she may not be a flighty writer, I am a flighty reader, and I always ask ten thousand questions. Some having to do with faults in logic she may not have seen, but usually it’s just me overthinking it from a writer’s perspective. Before she told me that she had outlined– something she had not done to the same extreme before–I found myself in awe of how much smoother and polished her work seemed, how few questions I had, and how much I could just sit back and be jealous of her mad writing skills—I mean, enjoy the novel. Not only does Undertow feel so thoroughly developed but also natural and right.
Still wondering why I used the term “organic” versus outlining?
The first time I had heard the word “organic” in reference to literature was in one of the most difficult classes of my collegiate career, a little undergrad class called Critical Approaches to Literature. I was terrified, especially when our professor told us to go home and look it up. The next day, after my unfruitful search, she enlightened us: Organic Unity was what Aristotle attributed to a work with a beginning, middle, and end, in which every part of it is inseparable from the cohesive whole. If one part is subtracted from that interdependent whole, the entirety falls apart. Though I use the term organic as natural or unplanned, in this context, I feel my proposal lends itself to this concept of Aristotle’s Organic Unity more than writing without an outline.
While I believe outlining does not necessarily hinder your writing process in lieu of this organic unity, I don’t know that I could ever pass Grisham’s Guantanamo-Bay-esque outlining camp. Incorporating some outlining into your prewriting approach could end up being very worth the payoff though, and I hope I have demystified and de-structuralized it a bit to make it less off-putting.
The Verdict
Prewriting and preparation are about what works for you and should be a sacred ritual. It should be tailored to what inspires/benefits/encourages/prepares you. If you set pen to paper and just let it take you where you want, then by all means, surprise the hell out of yourself. If you plan every minute detail and that seems to be working for ya, then plan away. Or if you’re somewhere in the middle on this, for both organic writing and outlined writing often lean on one another—the situation of most writers, I suspect—then keep on keeping on.
Finally, if you humbly came to this post because what you are currently doing does not seem to be working, then, hopefully, some of the pros and cons of both approaches and the experts’ opinions laid out here help you find the path of stress-free, productive, not-throwing-you-cell-phone-because-you’re-procrastinating-with-twitter-at-your-cat* composition.
*(or dog, if you’re a writer you probably have one or the other. It’s easier for them than humans to deal with our type)
And if you’re not into outlining, but you like to be organized, check out these writing tips
Want to weigh in? Please do! I would love to hear any additional pros or cons not addressed here. Also, if you have your own post on this subject, I’d love to add it to the additional sources!
Ashley B. Davis 
You must be logged in to post a comment.