Writing methods

Hm, a friend's post on lj got me to thinking about how I write. So here are some random thoughts, internet.

In terms of plans, I went through distinctive stages in my approach: when I was a joyful kid, I wrote unheeding of rhyme, reason or plans. When I was a teenager, I learned to plan, and then gave it up because I realised that it was so much more fun and fulfilling to plan than it was to write the damned thing, so I never got round to the writing itself. Then I went through university, which was three years of not really writing except academically. Then I did NaNoWriMo and got my mojo back, learning that it was fun not to plan as well, and that the chaotic pace of creativity led to cool and interesting twists and turns. On the other hand, I quickly realised that the drafts produced were all but uneditable and that if it was an idea I actually cared about, writing at a break-neck pace meant I lost the form, shape and tone I wanted overall. Turns out it's a lot easier to form that as you go along than it is to put it in afterwards (for me, anyway).

So now I'm trying to craft my writing as I go. It's painstaking and incredibly slow, and may mean I never finish anything, but I'm producing something I care about that won't make me wince when I try and read back through it. It's a problem as I seek out the perfect beginning, which is causing massive writer's block in one case as I have to get the beginning right before the rest will (hopefully) magically follow, but I'm getting closer each time I try again.

I really like that Philip Pullman quote from the NaNoWriMo Pep Talk he did comparing a WIP to a ship: if you let it idle for too long, "you have to warm the engines up, start the great bulk of the shipmoving through the water again, work out your position, check the compassbearing, steer carefully to bring it back on track..." It kind of feels like that every day when I sit down to write, but I have a great hatred for writing snippets myself. When other people do it, it's cool. I just don't like to write unless I'm writing something that has meaning for me. I hate doing writing exercises. It's like my tendency never to roll my dice in a game unless I'm making a check. I just can't sit there and write a drabble with my characters chatting, or a description of a garden, unless it has a meaningful place in the story. So, for instance, I have written a bit where two of my characters get together in an AU that doesn't occur in the actual novel, but on some level I like to assume it's in the plot and never mentioned to explain all that sexual tension. I have written snippets, drabbles, exercise pieces, etc. but they never engaged me. I feel they're lacking the passion of my longer stuff, though at times they have been good.

I think planning and writing take different kinds of thought. One is the pure creative blast of imagining, without rules, without boundaries, anything goes and you know if it doesn't feel quite right. The other is much more logical, slower, and at times sweeter. It's like a sugar rush vs. the feeling of warm fuzzy contentment you get on a sunny day, or whatever equivalent experience you enjoy. However, putting one word in front of the other can be delicious and simple, pleasure coming from the construction of sentences or the imagined feel of words on the tongue. I find words sensual, as I can see their shapes, hear their sounds in my head, and know how they would feel to say.

Still, sometimes it's tough, if you can't think of what to do next, so you just dawdle in writing form (how I suspect a lot of filler is born) or if things aren't working the way you want them to. So sometimes it's worth doing the NaNoWriMo thing of just pushing through until you wrestle that damned muse back into line, word by bloody word. But then, sometimes it's because you don't know the nature of the beast, and there's some hidden treasure in the world you've created, if only you can find it by planning.