Writing is Composing

So I’ve started work on my next novel (working title My Next Novel) and I’m amazed at how little I know about the story, yet how little that seems to bother me. Having been down this road a couple of times now, with Under The Gun and Grifter’s Role (final edited MS delivered to the publisher this week), I understand that my approach to novel writing is all about knowing, but not knowing, where the story is headed. I mean, I like to have (and seem to have) a general sense of how things will turn out, but if I know too much, it seems to kill my enthusiasm for writing it. This may be a problem, because I will have to submit both sample chapters and an outline to my publisher before I’ll get the green light for My Next Novel. But if I outline it in too much detail, I risk spoiling the ending for myself. How weird is that?

On the other hand, I was writing yesterday morning in Starbucks (God love Starbucks – a bit of Americana in Moscow) and had a bit of a revelation. I’d written a word – it doesn’t matter which – and paused to think about what it meant and what I intended to do with it. Then, after musing upon it briefly, I composed a few sentences of related thought. Stopped. Found another word. Repeated the process. This, I realized, is exactly how my novels get written. I stumble across some fragment of interesting thought (well, interesting to me, at any rate) and then improvise around it, to see if it will turn into something worth committing to the text. Many drafts later, it might turn into something that makes the final cut. But the important thing is that I seem to give myself the freedom to “riff” on an idea, without particularly worrying whether it’s right, relevant, or even particularly good. Is there such a thing as an improvised novel? You certainly couldn’t get away with that in television or film, but a novel is different. I mean, if the reader expects something to be closely plotted, then of course you have to meet that expectation. However, the reader doesn’t know what other paths you could have taken through a novel. They only see the version you publish. So in this case, “The ocean is blue, but it’s also wet.” There’s not only more than one right answer, there are countless ones.

Now here’s some art.

I’d better hope to be a good writer, because as an artist I’m fairly crap.

More later, -jv

Comments

[Hamish MacDonald]

It's funny to hear you say this, 'cause you're the guy whose books taught me about story structure!

It's become essential to my process, asking all these questions that lead to an outline -- though lots of extra detail shows up over the span of time it takes to write a book, much of it subconsciously (and that foundation work is surely what points the mind in a particular direction). I'm not smart enough to come up with the connections and revelations I discover in my stories!

I think of the relationship between the outline and the finished novel like that between a map of Paris and a visit to the actual city: the trip is more fun when I know I have a map, even if it stays in my back pocket most of the time.

A friend of mine writes for a TV show in Canada (they DO have them there, even if nobody outside the country has heard of them), and one of his mentors once said to him, "Blah blah, I don't care about your explanation of the story. Just tell me how it ends. If it doesn't end well, none of the rest matters."

It's a bit over-simple, but I think it points to the same things you do in "Creativity Rules" and "The Comic Toolbox": there are certain check-boxes for stories that always satisfy the reader when they're ticked -- even if it's considered more 'literary' to thwart and torture the reader these days by denying these payoffs (or any feeling of progress or coherent arc).

I guess you reach a point where you do that groundwork instinctively, though, while playing with other notions.

[cromoniquel]

If you can create some art just rolling a tinfoil, even if it doesn’t deserve be in a museum, it’s just creativity. So, with your great experience as writer, just rolling words you can write a new novel or what you want. The most important thing is you are enjoying creatively.