Wow, it's been a long time since I've done something with
the blog, hasn't it? Well, maybe that will change. Maybe. Assuming I don't get
sidetracked with other things again. Actually, I think I'm getting sidetracked
talking about a blogging schedule that doesn't actually exist instead of what
I'm wanting to talk about. To the discussion!
I was musing over writing (yes, this is going to be another
rambling post about my writing. Sorry.), and thinking about all of the
different projects I've tackled over the years, trying to figure out what I
wanted to write, and then something just hit me, like a punch to the face. I
realized something that my earlier body of work (including attempted rewrites of
earlier projects, revisions and etc. etc.): I planned all of these by...not
planning.
That sounds contradictory, but it's really not. When I
started writing, I didn't waste time trying to work out the details of a plot
or setting, I didn't waste time trying to figure out the nuances of my
characters in advance and I didn't plan out anything about the setting. I
just...wrote and let things happen as they happened. And every single time I
did that, the projects went somewhere interesting (and led to countless
rewrites, revisions, editing and resulting in really giant folders stuffed with
all sorts of world-building notes I attempted to expand upon what I'd written
in the text.
Then, as time progressed, I stopped doing this and
instead was trying to do extensive planning,
note-taking and world-building before I actually wrote a single word of the
draft. My reasoning, of course, was that the things I started tended to evolve
into giant mega-projects comprising multiple books, countless subplots, more
characters than I could shake a stick at and a deep, detailed world - all of
which I thought needed to be planned out in advance before penning a single
word of actual story and substance. This, in hindsight, was a particularly treacherous trap.
None of the projects I attempted to construct like this went
anywhere - there were a few that felt like they started to go somewhere, but
all of the notes turned out to be dead ends. None of them went on for longer
than a handful of pages and all of it was either really broad strokes of a plot
without any of the specifics, or just general world-building, a good deal of
which amounted to background stuff that would have been a minor part of the plot had I actually
wrote a draft of it.
None of these later projects lasted particularly long and while
there was promise in some of them, I never really did anything with any of them. Though
I maybe will at some point.
Then compared to the old way of doing things, when I just
wrote a draft, tied and gagged my internal editor (and then threw him in a
closet for good measure. Actually...when I first started writing, I don't think I had one) - I had a plot that appeared, character development,
world-building. Stuff I could actually use. Those projects spawned a world and
hundreds upon hundreds of pages. A project that went somewhere for once. I had something to show for my
efforts.
Just jumping headfirst into a draft, no real planning other
than the vaguest of thoughts on where I'm taking this (and constantly adjusting
things along the way) led to results. Meticulous note-taking sent me to a dead end in the middle of nowhere land.
Just writing the draft and letting the words flow, without worries about whether
its good or not (I can deal with that in subsequent rewrites and editing
sessions) leads to much more interesting developments than planning everyone
out in advance.
This method of planning, basically, is perpetual NaNoWriMos, only with no word count and no
deadline.
So - then why does this method work for me? The main reason
is, I think, that note-taking is dull. I can't get invested in just saying these things. World-building sounds exciting (and
it is) but doing it the way I was doing it is boring. World-building while
writing the draft is much more interesting, because it feels more like I'm
actually interacting with the world and discovering it. Thinking on it, that's actually one of the most fundamental laws of writing, isn't it? Show, don't tell. Readers (and apparently the guy writing this stuff) are engaged when you show them the world you've built, they're (I'm?) not when it's just a detailed laundry list of things like political structures of various governments, a write-up of the history of a fictitious religion, imports and exports of the countries and why its significant - blah, blah, blah. Boring.
Writing stories, on the other hand, is about as far from
dull as I can imagine. For a long time, I fell into a rut and despaired of ever
actually finding the spark again, finding what I loved about writing in the
first. Then I tried doing things the old way - taking one of the newer projects
and just jumping into it. Was it planned? Not really. I had a loose idea of the
world and of a general plot, but that was about it. That was all note-taking
had given me. Writing those things I mentioned above in a draft: characters meet members of the government, who give them problems, priests conduct ceremonies in the streets and proselytize about their faith that leads to interesting details that wouldn't have made it into the notes. Or maybe characters debate their particular theology, which both does world-building and character-building, simultaneously. Merchants complain about prices of those imports and exports. It's a million times more interesting and fun.
I remembered, as I was writing today, why I love writing
fantasy so much. The sheer joy of creating a world, of watching a story unfold
from my fingertrips, from seeing people, with different views and thoughts than
mine, appear born from the silvery clouds of my thoughts. Just seeing what
they're up to, how they interact, cheering for their successes, crying for
their failures - it's an extraordinarily beautiful, exciting thing to see,
something no amount of note-taking can ever really achieve.
And not planning - just jumping into the story, with no
notion of careful preparation, no particular thoughts about the plot, except for the vaguest, broadest possible ideas and
letting it evolve and develop organically - results in far more substance and
more detailed plans than the most meticulous amount of note-taking. I'm five
pages into the draft of this project and already I've established things about
the world that never once cropped up in my notes and learned a few things about
the characters that I wasn't expecting to learn.
Is it good? No, but it's only a draft. A very rough draft at
that, but one I'm going to follow all the way through. It's the planning
process by not planning at all.
I feel like I'm back again. Time will tell.
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