Ricochets

After receiving a comment from Rob Brooks, who blogs about the ongoing process of writing his first novel at Work in Progress, I decided to take a look at some of his posts. It became obvious to me that he and I approach our writing in different ways. I was inspired to leave a comment on Rob’s doorstep in this regard. Provided below, with some bracketed commentary from both Rob and me, is the gist of my comment on his page. It just goes to show there are more paths than one between points “a” and “b.”

When I started my completed manuscript, I had neither an idea how long it should be nor an inkling of what the story would be other than an intention to write about a serial killer. There was no outline. I simply wrote until I had a sufficiently long trail of blood, made my good guys adequately likable and inspiring, and revealed a villain both pitiable and worthy of hate. I ended up stopping at a bit over 72,000 words. I did some research that told me that novels fell between 50,000 and 100,000 words. It seemed I was right in the cozy middle, so I simply polished and tidied up. As you might have seen in some of my posts, I have since discovered that I might be a bit word-stingy for my genre, though James Patterson writes at about that count or less and seems to be prospering. One misconception, at least for me, revealed early in my writing process was that a keyboard would be the tool of creation. My experience with composing for business purposes was that the edit-on-the-fly capability provided by a computer was a good thing. I quickly found in writing my manuscript that I got too involved in editing and formatting and lost my creativity. In my case, story flowed much better from a pen. Granted, I wasn’t too happy about having to transcribe, but it really is all about creativity, characters, and story.

[Rob responded that his creativity flows right into his keyboard from his fingertips.]

My writing sessions were compartmentalized in the form of lunch hours spent up a spiral iron staircase in a loft windowed to overlook the main floor of a coffeehouse. Being in that environment came to mean putting my creativity in gear. The ability to observe the other patrons helped in writing people stuff, especially one scene that actually played out in a fictional coffeehouse. The story revealed itself to me in session after session, and I was excited each day to see where it would go.

I’d love to know the percentage of novelists who keyboard versus pen their works or who are outliners as opposed to spontaneous writers. It would be nice to know this in the overall, as well as segmented by authors categorized as the bestselling, the published, the middling, the struggling, and the unpublished. Another view might be by genre.

[Rob said, “I'd like to know, too. I know I would love to be a spontaneous writer. Stephen King claims to be, says he doesn't outline. I don't know how that could be, though, because there are so many things going on in his books, and they all tie together so nicely. He must change a lot in the edits.”]

[Red Stick Writer: I think sheer genius is the explanation for King. Simply in terms of subject matter, I’m not crazy about all of his stories, but they are told masterfully. Others of his stories, The Stand for instance, are among the best I’ve ever read. I would probably not have read it, but a friend strenuously recommended it. I’ll be forever grateful. Though I only saw the movie, The Shawshank Redemption, based on a King novella, was a great tale, too. His On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is one of the best books about writing to be found.]