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Write or Wrong

There are two basic philosophies about how you write a novel: Gardeners or architects--also known as pansters and outliners. The idea of "pantsing" is that you're writing by the seat of your pants. You don't have a lot of stuff written down. You feel a story is in there somewhere, and that you need to write about it. Here's how Stephen King phrases it in his memoir/writing advice book (page 163-164):
I believed stories are found things, like fossils in the ground...Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered, pre-existing world. The writer's job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible. Sometimes the fossil you uncover is small; a seashell. Sometimes it's enormous, a Tyrannosaurus rex with all those gigantic ribs and grinning teeth. Either way, short story or thousand-page whopper of a novel, the techniques of excavation remain basically the same.
Technically, he's discussing the general sense of where story comes from, but the quote itself is a great description of a pantser: There is a story out there, and it merely needs to be uncovered. To put it another way, there are seeds of story already planted in the garden and it's the writer's job to cultivate the natural growth of the story.

The other concept--outlining/architecture--is that careful planning, plotting, constructing, and outlining will be what gives you the story. That is, putting it all down in a skeletal format before you jump into the more time consuming (and enjoyable, for me) part of actual writing is the best method. Both Brandon Sanderson and James Patterson abide by this outline-first model.

For a long time, I resisted the outline. "I've already told the story that way," I said to myself. "Why would I want to write it after outlining it?"

I've definitely changed my tune, in part because of my writing retreats. I don't necessarily want to spend time moving slowly across the page. It's much like running: I can get a writer's high when I build up enough speed and I have the right direction. I don't want to get bogged down in spotting plot errors and continuity problems if I don't have to. The feeling of being prolific is more satisfying than of being ponderous.

Nevertheless, I'm finding that there's a pleasurable allure to spending time in the garden, or excavating the dinosaur. The slow, deliberative prose that I write when I don't have a notecard in front of me is a different writing experience. I can't say that one is better than the other, but they're both aspects of writing that I enjoy.

If you take this idea of being a part-time pantser and an occasional outliner, then mix in the spontaneity of these non-fiction essays with the stretching of the novels I write, you may be able to see that I hope to grow and stretch as a writer. The discipline of daily writing is useful, but because it's so improvisational--and it accesses a piece of my brain that I don't use up during the day--I get a different appreciation out of it than when I slam out another chapter. Additionally, writing fiction in the evenings (when I normally write these essays) is very difficult for me to do. Part of it is energy, part of it is distraction (video games are a double-edged sword), but the end result is that evenings are for the nonfiction part of my brain.

I would say, in closing, that part of what's important about writing is recognizing the truth in this quote from Gene Wolf: “You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.” That's been my experience. While there are a lot of techniques and behaviors that are consistent, each book is a different entity. How much world building, how much exploring, how much outlining always varies. Some books I've heavily outlined and then I lost interest in them. Some are a couple of ideas that I tease out by doing "chapter sketches" that give me a sense of the world and characters. What works for one book doesn't really work for the next.

One thing is for sure, however, the only wrong way to write is to not write at all.

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