Prose Night at the Writing Life, 8 June 2024
Explaining my current system of writing rough drafts.
Roughly a decade ago or earlier, I vowed to myself I was going to stop merely claiming to be a writer and start writing more. I wanted to write some books, and I wanted to start blogging.
In the years since I first started vowing to myself to return to writing, I’ve managed to accomplish both those things. However, the writing process for both books I’ve written up to this point, The Holy Fool and The Yank Striker, took several years to complete. At the book fairs and shows I’ve attended over the past year or so, I’ve looked at my pile of two books and the piles of other authors with multiple books and thought, I want to grow my stacks. I want a few more books before I finish up.
The question has been how to do it.
I’m currently at work on what will become The Yank Striker 2 [NOTE: this is a working title]. This work has now been ongoing for a year. If I am extremely lucky, I might have a final draft by this time next year. But I’m going to have to push myself absolutely. I want to get my writing process refined to the point where I am writing at least one book a year, or at least completing one rough draft a year.
During the past couple of years, I have been refining a simple system of writing designed to produce rough drafts at a more rapid rate than I have ever written large projects in the past. I don’t claim to have developed the perfect system by any means, but its results when I’ve used it to develop the rough drafts for first The Yank Striker and then for my current works in progress. To both give you some insight into my creative process, and perhaps give any of you interested in writing ideas for how you can streamline your own processes, I’m going to share what I’m doing for my fiction here.
Writing Conditions
As I begin this explanation, I need to emphasize writing is very much an individualized art. By this, I mean every writer has their own skill sets, tastes, and priorities. These are always an influence on whether any particular plan or technique might be effective or not.
As an example of this, I’m going to share some of my own writing conditions that have influenced my desire to implement this system and also why I think it might be effective for me.
One of the primary goals of my writing career is to produce more fiction as quickly as possible. I am well aware I am beginning to enter, or have entered, the second half of my life. While I believe I have more than a few years of writing left for me, I do realize there will be a finite amount of time I am working with. I wish to be as productive as possible and create as much fiction as I can in the time I do have. I would love to have the problem of having written all of the projects I’ve pictured in my head and having to look for new ideas.
When I was younger, I always had the instinct to view my projects as large, stand-alone books. I wanted to write deeply detailed, thick books examining all aspects of the action. The Holy Fool was perhaps the biggest example of this type of thinking, where I larded up my work with side scenes and extended dialogue passages. I eventually ended up excising nearly one-third of my rough draft from The Holy Fool during the revision process.
Now, however, I realize I want to produce more books at a faster rate rather than just authoring a few books. This would lead me to divide any big story idea into several smaller stories. Any idea I’d have for a 200,000-word tome, for example, could easily be converted into a four-book series with each book being somewhere around 50,000-60,000 words. And people like collecting book series. It’s not only sensible, it’s marketable.My long and frustrating battle with procrastination has long been documented on this blog, and I will not belabor the point here. However, I will say one of my biggest sticking points with delays on my work is getting bored with writing a scene that at first glance seems like an important scene linking some of the action. Over time, I’ve come to trust my instincts when I begin to feel this way. Those instincts are telling me, ‘Liegois, this is going to be one of those scenes readers are going to skip over to get to the good stuff. Why take up pages with it when you can just start writing about the good stuff?’
With all of those factors in play, I believe my system for producing rough drafts makes sense for me.
My System: Key Events
As we start out here, I need to mention a few items I’m not going to explore in depth. I’m not going to discuss developing general ideas for your stories, settings, and/or characters. In my opinion, you’ll have gotten all this sorted out before you sit down and start writing your rough draft. Those steps in developing a story belong in a different article altogether. So, let’s assume there’s no problem in this area.
One of the biggest pieces of advice I had to anyone I was teaching writing to is, “whatever gets you to write, keep doing that.” It never mattered to me if a technique didn’t make sense or if it wouldn’t work or be necessary for me personally. If some trick or plan or technique was effective for an individual writer, keep using it. Writers are individuals, and they will have as many different effective systems, I think, as there are writers.
Along these lines, there is always a debate between whether you should be a “plotter” writer, or laying out what you plan to write before you write, or a “pantser” writer, or someone who comes up with an idea and starts writing about it and allowing the narrative to go wherever it goes - going by the seat of their pants, essentially. I know and admire several different pantsers, including one of my literary idols, Stephen King, and many of my fellow writers in the writing groups I’ve participated in. King was once quoted as saying, “Outlines are the last resource of bad fiction writers who wish to God they were writing masters’ theses.”
I agree with King on many things writing-related, but this is one area where I divert from him, in part. This is because I’m of the impression that his individual solution does not quite work for me. I have come to believe pantsing tends to work for individuals who are very productive and prolific with their writing. They can throw a lot of action and dialogue onto the page quickly and move on.
On the other hand, I have demonstrated the ability to balk at trying to put together a lot of text. If I don’t know where I’m going in a general sense, I manage to get lost or even indifferent to my own material. I’ve written two (published) books in my lifetime, and King had written a hell of a lot more books by the time he got to be my age.
This is why I would generally label myself as a plotter. However, I do agree with King that becoming too elaborate with an outline can be a detriment as well. Once you write a detailed outline, the tendency is to stick with everything you wrote down ahead of time rather than try to improvise and adapt once you are in the process of writing. To use one example, it’s like how the famed pro wrestling executive Vince Russo often wrote out exactly what wrestlers would say to each other, all of the moves and techniques they would use on each other, and how the scenes would be presented. By not allowing the wrestlers to improvise and adapt as the situation called for, it created a stilted and unnatural product.
With this in mind, alongside my notes on characterization, setting, and premise, I always lay out what the key events of my book will be. These are what I consider to the essential parts of my book, which serve to establish key characters and plot situations, show the progression of the plot and premise, show how key characters develop and grow through the story, and how the action arrives at a climax and then gets resolved.
All I will do before writing these scenes is sketch out their essential premises, who is involved in the scenes, and their purposes. Anything else I wait until later. It’s a lot more convenient to either add, change, rearrange, or delete such scenes if the occasion call for it if I have not gone into massive details beforehand. It’s a lot more flexible process than more detailed outlines.
My System: Whatever Order You Want
Once you set up these key events, you can start writing them in whichever order you wish. Don’t feel bound by the order they appear in your story, but take on the challenge of writing them whenever you feel ready to tackle them. Just like a movie director usually shoots his footage out of sequence to accommodate a variety of factors, such as actor or location availability, you can do the same thing for your book.
The advantage this allows me is I can start writing in whatever part of the story I want to tackle at any particular point. I’m not shackled down to a particular order I have to write in. This tends to greatly lessen any time spent procrastinating about having to write any particular scene. It also helps lessen the type of writing fatigue you can get if you are stuck on any particular scene for an extended period of time.
I have also found following this technique also can give me some additional insights into what I am writing. If I find I’m not feeling good or excited about one of those key scenes, it’s usually a signal for me to forget writing it. Sometimes I might think of another key scene needing addition, or maybe a key scene that belongs in a different part of the narrative. As I’ve said before to my students, the fact we write on either paper or computer program rather than stone makes it much easier to add, subtract, or move around our words however it needs to be done.
However, I do tend to leave the last key scene (the ending) as the last thing I write. It’s the extra treat at the end of the writing process to help celebrate, like eating the red jellybeans in the pack for last.
My System: Finish Up Whenever You Want
Once you get the key events out of the way, you can take a quick look at your rough draft to see whether you need to add any linking scenes or additional key scenes to your story or not. Sometimes this will be necessary, but other times you may take a look at the rough draft and think ‘the story is more or less complete.’
One of the advantages of this technique is it often streamlines the writing process and allows you to complete the rough draft process in a more timely manner, and usually in a more compact text. Also, this tends to leave a lot of filler material many readers might just skim over on the cutting room floor, so to speak.
After you feel you’re finished with the rough draft, congratulate yourself and set it aside for an extended period of time. Once you have spent some time away from your work and are ready to examine it with fresh eyes, you can begin the revision process, which is a whole other kettle of sharks I will not get into in this piece.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this look into a portion of my writing process might have given you some ideas on how to improve your own process. Regardless of how I write, however, remember that bit of advice I had for my students: If it works for you when you write, keep using it.
Writers keep writing and everyone keep safe.
A Quick Note
I’m hoping to produce another bonus piece for the site this weekend. It will be a quick essay regarding my first trip ever by train just last week and how train travel has always held a fascination for me.
If I’m really lucky, you’ll be able to see this new piece on this Sunday, tomorrow. If I get held up by some family obligations, you’ll likely get it on Sunday of next weekend.