What is your writing method? What carries you from blank page to first draft?

I don’t talk much on Fungible Convictions about my own fiction writing, partly out of superstition but mostly because Fungible Convictions exists to keep me from thinking about how I’m not writing the fiction I task myself with.

But in reflecting more on the whole outlining debate, I dove back into the muck about my own writing method. The fact is, after six years of writerly commitment, I have yet to find a method that doesn’t result in a 90% first-page failure rate. I peter out.

Sometimes failure makes you feel stupid. Here’s this great idea you have—for a scene, an argument, a character—but you get nowhere. You feel energized, then overwhelmed, then frustrated.

Lately, though, I’ve been trying something new that seems to be working. It’s not outlining, which I still don’t trust, but it’s not free-writing either. I’ll describe it this way:

What’s the first thing you do when you start a jigsaw puzzle? You don’t look for matches right away. You turn all the pieces face up first. You separate those faced pieces into groups, based on color, then on shape.

That’s what I’m doing with my fiction method now. Instead of writing blind, I’m making notes on the discrete things I know have to be present: characters and their features and backgrounds, a setting or two and their meaning, points of conflict. I’m turning these things face up. The chaos of the puzzle isn’t as chaotic.

I don’t know where the story I’m working on now will end up, still. But it’s much more manageable. I’m not making up the plot at the same time I’m inventing motives at the same time I’m imagining how someone walks through a scene I haven’t even begun to describe when I should have described it two pages ago. I haven’t finished a single story this way, but for the first time in months I have reason to be confident.

So, what in your writing process keeps you confident? Is it about laying the tracks, about a method that carries you through? Or is it something totally intangible, like the love of the idea of a character?

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 12th, 2006 and is filed under autobio, lit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
  • http://www.authorstore.com/ Jamie

    For me, it’s sharing the work – even in a rough state. That keeps me working through the story and it also helps me work through the details that need to be in the story, especially when I want to get on with it.

    Knowing that someone is going to read that rough work makes me fill in action so that things make sense, because I hate trying to explain “why this was like that” and “why so and so said whatever”. When I turn over a piece of draft, those questions remind me that I need to get more story out of the work rather than window dressing. Also, knowing that someone is waiting for the next installment also keeps is working.

    In order to do this, you have to produce some fairly refined “draft” and do it on a consistent basis. That keeps the fires going though and keeps me focused on the task.

    From this comment, you can probably tell that I like to ramble on from idea to idea. Bouncing story ideas about without much sense of closure. Of course, no one wants to read these kinds of things (sorry, everyone) but again that is one of the tweaks that keeps the fiction machine running in the right direction.

  • http://www.authorstore.com Jamie

    For me, it’s sharing the work – even in a rough state. That keeps me working through the story and it also helps me work through the details that need to be in the story, especially when I want to get on with it.

    Knowing that someone is going to read that rough work makes me fill in action so that things make sense, because I hate trying to explain “why this was like that” and “why so and so said whatever”. When I turn over a piece of draft, those questions remind me that I need to get more story out of the work rather than window dressing. Also, knowing that someone is waiting for the next installment also keeps is working.

    In order to do this, you have to produce some fairly refined “draft” and do it on a consistent basis. That keeps the fires going though and keeps me focused on the task.

    From this comment, you can probably tell that I like to ramble on from idea to idea. Bouncing story ideas about without much sense of closure. Of course, no one wants to read these kinds of things (sorry, everyone) but again that is one of the tweaks that keeps the fiction machine running in the right direction.

  • http://billectric.wordpress.com/ Bill Ectric

    I’m starting to do a bit more outlining than I used to. Your jigsaw puzzle analogy gave me an idea: I just finished making index cards for each character in my novel, listing traits and all kinds of info about each person. I plan to refer to the card of whichever character I am writing about.

    Jamie, I also agree with you about sharing my work. It motivates me when I know someone will soon be reading a chapter I’m working on. I’m thinking about posting my entire novel-in-progress on my blog. Do you think that’s a good idea?

    You know, it’s funny how newer writers refuse to put their work on the internet because they are afraid someone will steal it; whereas, if you’ve been around a while, you realize you are lucky if someone even READS it.

  • http://billectric.wordpress.com/ Bill Ectric

    I’m starting to do a bit more outlining than I used to. Your jigsaw puzzle analogy gave me an idea: I just finished making index cards for each character in my novel, listing traits and all kinds of info about each person. I plan to refer to the card of whichever character I am writing about.

    Jamie, I also agree with you about sharing my work. It motivates me when I know someone will soon be reading a chapter I’m working on. I’m thinking about posting my entire novel-in-progress on my blog. Do you think that’s a good idea?

    You know, it’s funny how newer writers refuse to put their work on the internet because they are afraid someone will steal it; whereas, if you’ve been around a while, you realize you are lucky if someone even READS it.

  • http://www.diaryofaheretic.blogs.com/ grasshopper

    The jig-saw puzzle analogy is lovely and seductive. And maybe in the future, I will try it.
    Right now, I’m running a marathon. I write original fiction on my blog, with a self-imposed requirement that I post a coherent piece Monday-Friday. (On Saturdays and Sundays I am sequentially posting a novel I wrote a few years ago.) This schedule leaves me with little to no time to write other fiction. But I have hopes the set-up will pay off later.
    Before starting the blog, I had fallen into a pattern of polishing every paragraph, and proceeding only when I felt the page or two was as perfect as I could make it. Conceivably this might work for another writer; for me it produced, cause or effect, writer’s block. This most recent experience reminded me of other times I was stuck, but denying it, insisting to myself that the continuous rewriting was rewarding me with terrifically evocative openings, transitions, wherever in a narrative the perfectionism infected me–it does feel like a disease.
    The goal of posting new fiction Monday through Friday forces me to develop stronger plot-lines, always my weakest aspect. It allows for NO rewriting, though, which is frustrating. My age-old technique has always been to develop a loose plot and very vivid (to me anyway) characters with elaborate inner lives. Now I figure out what happens next for my daily post and concentrate until I hear the words echoing in my head.
    Other than the adrenaline rush writing fiction gives me, good day or bad, the blog does reward me with a handful of daily readers as opposed to a few yearly ones–if that.

  • http://www.diaryofaheretic.blogs.com grasshopper

    The jig-saw puzzle analogy is lovely and seductive. And maybe in the future, I will try it.
    Right now, I’m running a marathon. I write original fiction on my blog, with a self-imposed requirement that I post a coherent piece Monday-Friday. (On Saturdays and Sundays I am sequentially posting a novel I wrote a few years ago.) This schedule leaves me with little to no time to write other fiction. But I have hopes the set-up will pay off later.
    Before starting the blog, I had fallen into a pattern of polishing every paragraph, and proceeding only when I felt the page or two was as perfect as I could make it. Conceivably this might work for another writer; for me it produced, cause or effect, writer’s block. This most recent experience reminded me of other times I was stuck, but denying it, insisting to myself that the continuous rewriting was rewarding me with terrifically evocative openings, transitions, wherever in a narrative the perfectionism infected me–it does feel like a disease.
    The goal of posting new fiction Monday through Friday forces me to develop stronger plot-lines, always my weakest aspect. It allows for NO rewriting, though, which is frustrating. My age-old technique has always been to develop a loose plot and very vivid (to me anyway) characters with elaborate inner lives. Now I figure out what happens next for my daily post and concentrate until I hear the words echoing in my head.
    Other than the adrenaline rush writing fiction gives me, good day or bad, the blog does reward me with a handful of daily readers as opposed to a few yearly ones–if that.