If you’ve done any prowling around internet
circles, you’ve likely heard the bit of writing advice which boils down to (however
it is actually phrased) “Just sit down and write”, as if, through sheer willpower,
any and all obstacles keeping one’s WIP from being completed can be surmounted
by placing fingers to keys and writing. To this advice, I reply in the words of
Truman Capote: “That’s not writing, it’s typing”. To be fair, he said this to
mock writers like Jack Kerouac and others who, for whatever reason, were not up
to his snuff, but I think if we ignore this intention (death of the author, and
all that), it’s actually pretty accurate.
Writing is not typing, or at least, it’s not only typing. I’ve probably mused on this
before, but the writing process is more like what your middle school language
arts teacher taught you than what popular writer zeitgeist would have you
believe. Writing involves 3 to 5 processes, depending on where you make the divisions.
Let’s split the difference and go with four. These are prewriting, which
includes brainstorming and outlining; “writing”, i.e. typing content; editing,
which involves rewriting, rearranging, continuity checking, and copy-editing;
and publishing, which involves either querying an agent or formatting the whole
book yourself. From my experience, most of these processes bleed into each
other, meaning that one will do a lot of brainstorming while typing, and might
outline while rearranging things during edits, and will certainly type while
rewriting, and so forth.
What does all this have to do with Capote?
Mostly it has to do with the fact that while you can force yourself to type, you cannot necessarily force yourself through
every stage of the writing process. People talk about how to get over “writer’s
block” by simply forcing yourself to “write”, which seems sound enough until
you realize that not all obstacles to writing, or maybe I should say to
finishing a work, are the same thing as writer’s block. I’ve had writer’s
block— that horrible ennui where you just don’t want to sit down and put words
on paper/word-processor—and, yeah, you kind of just have to power through it.
There’s a lot more to it than that, of course, and someday I will write about
why I think there are legitimate reasons not
to force yourself to type, but that is a post for another day. Writer’s block
is one problem, but others are less surmountable.
I personally don’t have problems with
prewriting, because I tend to wing it or just let whatever ideas pop into my
had and find a place for them. Other people, though, often complain about
having characters but no plot, a setting but not characters, etc. I’m not really
sure how these people get over this hurdle, so I can’t really speak on it. Then
there are issues with the publishing process: if one self-publishes, one simply
has to grapple with the peculiarities of whatever program one is using to
format, but if one is going the traditional route, then there is literally no
way to power through this stage of the process; it doesn’t matter how many
queries you send, because you are still beholden to the whims of whatever
agents read your query, who have workloads and time frames that you can do
nothing about. It’s literally a waiting game. The writing zeitgeist can say
“just sit down and write” all it wants, but that won’t get one traditionally
published any faster.
But, being prone to daydreaming, and thus
brainstorming, and being self-published, as I am, these aren’t that big of an
issue for me. No, my insurmountable hurdle usually comes during editing (I can
hear you say, “You tricked us, Rose! All this philosophizing about writing was
just one long excuse about why your book isn’t out on time!”. Haha, that it
is). True, I’ve experienced legitimate writer’s block while doing rewrites, and
that can be dealt with the same as when it happens during the initial writing
phase: Just sit down, as they say, and write. But what no one will tell you, so
I’m saying it now, is there is no way on earth to power through, skip over, or
just-sit-down-and-write away a continuity error or a plot hole or scene that is
just awful but that you don’t know
how to fix. Don’t get me wrong, you can try to type these away; I’ve tried.
I’ve tried starting new scenes to patch over a plot hole, only to scrap them
because they add more problems, or rewritten a scene that I hated over and over and over, ten times, only to still hate it. And I can’t move on from these
problems, because I refuse to publish a book with gaping plot holes and, worse,
scenes which I absolutely hate.
I have, in my infinite wisdom (acquired from
having rewritten my third book four and a half times), discovered two solutions
to this problem, neither of which involves typing. The first is to talk to
someone else about it. I’ll bounce ideas off my mother, father, or sister, and
one of two things will happen. Either, they come up with a solution I couldn’t
see, or through verbalizing the problem, I come up with a solution myself. The
other way to solve this problem is by writing out notes on paper. I don’t
consider this “just writing” because I don’t mean write the scene out on paper
(though that can be part of it). I mean scribble out what needs to happen in
the scene, or what needs to be addressed by the end of a patch of dialogue, or where
the continuity error lies. Then go nuts. Write out any and every possible
solution, every way the scene might go, no matter how weird. Is the error one
of timing? Write out timelines for each character to try to sync them all up.
Is there a plot hole? Write out ways to fix it, or maybe write out any
repercussions should that plot line simply be removed. Scratch, scribble, and
scrawl until you’ve come up with something, because it will all be scrapped
anyway. You aren’t wasting time typing and trying to make anything that will be
seen by human eyes; you’re writing out arcane symbols that only you can decipher,
and that, once used to type out the actual scene, will literally be thrown
away.
I think the issue with “just write” is that
typing is still a very insular aspect of the writing process. The words are
only those words the author finds acceptable, and has chosen precisely, and
thought about. It’s still very much in the writer’s own head, despite appearing
on a screen. Talking or note-writing, however, force a writer to get out of
their own head—and get their ideas out too—because either another person is
listening or the words are just thrown out onto paper and left to sit, rather
than being prettied up with the option of spell check and a “delete” button.
And it still might take a long time to find a solution to an error or to make a
scene that you love. There isn’t really any magic be-all and end-all solution
for writing problems, but I think I’ve found something that works for me, where
my problems lie, because writing involves a lot of thinking, talking, and tinkering
in order to get it just right.
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