Writing Processes

[kennychaffin]

and today's 50 word story - "A Demonstration"

 

[Luka Datas]

I found this answer to the question of "Do you always have to show and not tell in creative writing?" in Quora. The answer was supplied by Orson Scott Card, Writer of sci-fi and fantasy, professor at Southern Virginia University.

I'm posting it here because we talked a bit on this subject here, and since this guy has written some hugely popular books... his opinion might carry some weight for some writers here. Apologies to @KatG if this isn't strictly on topic.

***

In prose, showing means giving a detailed scene in which events unfold step by step, while telling means narrating events more rapidly and briefly, giving the reader more information than experience.

In good prose fiction, ninety percent of the events of the tale are neither shown nor told — they are simply assumed. I do not have to tell you that in riding the train from DC to New York, the character had to buy a ticket, or how much she paid, or which car she sat in, or whether she slept or read People Magazine or listened to an audio book on the way. If I tell you she took one bag, I need not specify what she packed, how she folded her clothing, or what vanity items she packed. Those things are never spoken of unless, for some reason, I think they matter.

Even then, they are rarely worth more than a mention. Only if they matter TO THE CHARACTERS will such narrative events be worthy of a scene, because actually showing an event as it unfolds, step by step, is the author's statement that this event is enormously important to the story, so the reader needs to experience it more directly and carefully, with a fuller understanding of causality — motive and mechanical cause.

Every scene that is shown is like a nuclear explosion in the fiction. You only show what must be made REAL to the readers, and those scenes are most effective if they are also rare.

If you showed every single event in a story as a detailed scene, it would be like screaming throughout the story. That has worked for some comedians, but how many hours in a row could you bear to listen to, say, Gilbert Gottfried?

When a teacher says “show, don't tell,” he is only correct if he means “make this event into a detailed scene, because it us too important to skim or skip over it.” In such cases, the advice might be worthwhile.

But as a general rule, to be applied at all times to all fiction, it is ludicrously stupid advice. Most storytelling should be just that, telling. The use of the scene is so powerful that you should only wield it where it must be used. Then you must make it feel exquisitely real.

It is only such scenes that will stand out in the readers' memory, but the scenes work because they are built on a foundation of clear, effective telling. It is possible to write unforgettable fictions with no shown scenes at all. But I think it is impossible to write a readable fiction that is all scene, no told story.

In fact, should you attempt it, you will find yourself writing a play, in which scenes are required to incorporate summaries and explanations of previous offstage action so that the current situation can be understood. Playwriting is a noble art, but if you're writing narrative, use all the tools of narrative in their proper proportion.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

Everything in a story is an element of the story. If it isn't actually part of the story -- e.g., you digress to a scene that does not develop character, move the plot forward, or (if you're a Steinbeck) create "mood" -- you cut that part out. Whether you showed or told the irrelevant excision means nothing.

 

[Edward M. Grant]

There's a spectrum between showing and telling, and most stories run up and down that spectrum on the way through, with the most important scenes largely shown and the least important largely told. Even in a single scene, you might show some parts and tell others.

If, say, the character is spending three weeks hunting through the British Library for some vital clue to the ancient conspiracy, you don't really want to show all three weeks of finding nothing, but you probably don't want to just say 'Three weeks later' and cut to them finding the vital clue.

Most books I've read lately use a lot of showing early in the story to get the reader hooked, then a lot of telling in the less important scenes so they don't end up with a 400,000 word book and a lot of bored readers.

That said, I think a fair amount of the telling in those books probably could have been removed. But they're best-selling writers, so I guess they err on the side of caution for readers who can't figure things out as easily for themselves.

 

[KatG]

I'm going to leave all this up but yeah, there's a lot of off-topic drift in this one. Which isn't usually a problem, especially in our Writing Forum. But for the hope of the OP -- me -- for what this particular thread might do, the drift is a bit of a problem. The subject for this thread is to present writers talking about their own writing processes, from their own essays or from interviews with them, talking about what they find that they do or try to do with their own stuff.

It is not to present them talking about their writing as the guide by which all writers should follow in their own writing. It is not about writers telling other writers what to do, instructing in the One Right Way to Write Fiction, or, shudder, the endless myth-based scolds about scenic description and exposition and how one is to "properly" mix them. (Though we have had other threads on that and can certainly have some more as you all like.) All of that discourages writers whose own writing processes don't fit those marching orders, rules and assertions of objective rightness that aren't actually real marching orders, real rules or real claims of objective rightness.

So many writers are stymied, labor unnecessarily or just give up writing fiction all together because they read a set of instructions about how to write, can't do it that way and think there is something wrong with them. So many published authors have talked about how they first struggled because they tried to do what they thought was necessary to be a "real" fiction writer and it was only when they realized there were more options from hearing other authors talk about their work or reading their work that they found their own voice and methods and were able to move forward. (This is why i'm always encouraging people to explore the whole market, not just look at the shiniest objects displayed.)

The hope again of this subject is that by showing various writers talking about the different ways in which they actually write, rather than the abstract, then other writers can see that there are myriad ways to dress a pig in story writing, including ways that may be a good fit for them and help them out. At the least it can be interesting for them in thinking about their own writing process. What I was after as a topic was inspirational, not instructional.

If the writing method that works for you personally is bound by a set of strictures you've adopted as your mantra, great. If you want to quote an author who works that way here, also great. But I'm after a wider palette concerning fiction writing, and I'm not looking for authors lecturing other authors with "do this" advice. I'm looking for authors talking about how they themselves actually write. Including them choosing to follow rules they've created for themselves, but them talking about their own writing.

I'm as guilty as the rest in being pulled into topic drift here. But I would like to center it back on authors talking about how they themselves write. So I'll try to find some new entries and encourage others to add ones like that.

 

[KatG]

And on that point, Ann Leckie:

I tend to say I’m not an outliner, but I was talking to an outliner recently (Hi, Juliette Wade!) who said, “Well, what do you do?” and I explained that I generally have an idea where I’m starting, and some idea where I want to end up, and a few landmarks on the way, and the rest I figure out as I go. And she was like, “Yeah, right, so you outline.” And I went huh. I tend to edit some as I go–partly because one of the reasons I don’t outline much is that I don’t know what the next scene will be until I’ve actually written the previous scene. Something as tiny as a character picking up the wrong object or saying the wrong thing can throw things in the wrong direction. Often I begin a day by looking back over what I did before and fixing it up–I’ll have had thoughts about it while I was away doing other things, often, and seen that I was doing something wrong.

So I don’t really separate out drafting and editing, until I have a complete manuscript, and then I read it over and think about it and start making changes. And I don’t have a set number of drafts, really. I just work on it until it’s done. Yes, the next question is how do I know it’s done? And the answer is different these days. It used to be “when the thought of opening the file again makes me want to cry” but these days it’s “about a month past the deadline.”

 

[Matthew Hughes]

This is second hand, but I once sent Joe R. Lansdale an email, after we were in an anthology together. I said:

I hadn't read you before we both had stories in one of the Martin/Dozois
anthos, but I found a couple of paperbacks in a thrift store (I can't
afford to buy books new, being an author). They were Freezer Burn and
Rumble Tumble, and I liked them both.

Reading them, I had cause to wonder if you do the same thing I do with a
story: i.e., no real outlining, just start with a character in a
situation, then have something happen that takes him out of that
situation and into trouble -- then see where it goes from there. I
usually find that, along the way, say about a third the way in, I start
to get an idea of what the story's about, thematically, and from then on
it runs pretty smoothly to where it has to go.

Is that how it works for you? Or are you a blueprint maker?

His reply:

That's exactly how I do it.

 

[KatG]

You and Lansdale are full detectives, then.

Jim Butcher (probably not for everybody and requires a support reader system):

What does your writing process look like?

It starts off with me sitting down to play some video games. Now, I know that doesn’t sound professional, but I actually did a writing speed study over two months, and found out that the nights that I play myself out on videogames and then sit down and start writing, that I actually get so much more writing done. I was actually hitting speeds of up to 2800 words an hour while I was doing that. When I didn’t do that, and I just sat down to grind out words, it was worse, and I would keep track of that, and I would average between 400 and 800 words an hour. So, two hours of video games plus one hour of writing was doing much better for me than anything else. So I like to think of it as writing smarter. But I will sit down and blow up people on first person shooter video games for a while cause I love those. I’m not as good at them as I used to be, so I just have to play cheap wiley old man tactics, But I’ll do that for a while and if I’ve blown up enough people and run over enough people with tanks and so on, and then I’m happy and I’ll sit down and start writing and I’ll write frantically for a couple of hours, and sort look up and I’ll have a chapter finished, and then I’ll stop and once the chapter’s done, I’ll get that sent off to my beta reader list, and I’ll usually do that and it’ll be five or six in the morning and then I’ll go to sleep and get up sometime early afternoon, and by then, the betas who got their email when they got up at normal human times will have sent me some feedback on that chapter and that gives me energy for the next chapter. So I sort of write to a live audience as I go. And I think it gives me a lot of really valuable feedback in terms of am I getting the things right that I want to get across to my readers. Am I creating all the stuff I want to create.

 

[Matthew Hughes]

You and Lansdale are full detectives, then.

Yes. I'm 29,000 words into a novel I started five weeks ago, using the discovery method I described to Joe. Yesterday, it came to me who the antagonist is and his motivation, all based on what I've already written. It all came into focus in a moment. I love when that happens.

 

[kennychaffin]

Yes. I'm 29,000 words into a novel I started five weeks ago, using the discovery method I described to Joe. Yesterday, it came to me who the antagonist is and his motivation, all based on what I've already written. It all came into focus in a moment. I love when that happens.

Honest courageous writing

 

[Matthew Hughes]

Honest courageous writing

Nah, just fun.

 

[kennychaffin]

Perhaps true, perhaps brave or perhaps in some people's view 'foolish.'

I've been thinking a lot about courageous writing after reading Elizabeth Gilbert's praise of Jack Gilbert, (no relation) a poet I first read many years ago but picked up his Collected Poems and have been reading it continuously for last few weeks.

I don't honestly know what his Writing Process is, but it appears to be equal parts Very Thoughtful/Crafted and Very Personal with a touch of antiestablishmentarianism.

 

[hscope]

Yes. I'm 29,000 words into a novel I started five weeks ago, using the discovery method I described to Joe. Yesterday, it came to me who the antagonist is and his motivation, all based on what I've already written. It all came into focus in a moment. I love when that happens.

It is fantastic when that happens. I look at it as my subconscious saving a very nice surprise as a reward for effort

 

[KatG]

Mary Robinette Kowal also makes use of a reader support system:

In truth I have a fairly fluid revision process. I put a lot of work into having an outline that is structurally sound so that I can put my writing effort into the emotion of the scenes. While that outline gets tweaked and adjusted as I go, it does mean that my revisions don’t usually involve major structural shifts.

I also write with alpha readers following along. They are seeing raw draft. I instruct them to just talk about how the story is playing and not to talk about sentence level issues. Generally, I stay about two chapters ahead of them, which I find is about the right spacing to be able to adjust to their reactions to the story and not need to ask them to re-read material that I’ve altered. Occasionally, I ret-con things for them. Having that give and take is helpful for me.

It also gives me the freedom to focus on the story and not the language. After I finish the story, I do a read-through to look at structure and pacing. Then my last pass is a language pass. I do a once over with the spell-check dictionary then read the entire thing aloud to adjust flow.

All told, I spend a couple of months in the outline/research phase, about two months to get the first draft, then another three months to revise and edit it.