a little bit at a time

After my last post, several people asked me how in Hades I manage to be patient in the high-speed modern day.

Damned if I know.

However, I think my fiction writing process has something to do with it.

See, I several minor writing frustrations, but only one major one - story ideas never occur to me whole and entire, only needing to be written down. I know writers who have this ability, and oh, how I envy them.

Unfortunately, elements of the idea appear to me in random fashion. I have to keep a constant eye out for the Next Thing that looks as though it relates to the story idea, which often isn't chronogically next in the story or next in any other logical sense. This leads to wading through and examining all the Things and figuring out how they fit together and continually revising my assumptions about them as each new Thing appears. It sounds like a laborious process, and it is.

For awhile, I thought this meant I wasn’t a “real writer." Surely real writers have a more orderly and sane and quicker way of going about writing a story.

I have no idea why it happens like this for me, and oddly, my nonfiction writing process (including blog posts) is far more efficient and structured. It's a weird beast, this fiction writing thing.

And now that I think of it, I had a college art lesson that is very like my story discovery process:

The professor projected an image on the screen. However, the image was deliberately out of focus. We were instructed to “draw what you see.” Hard to do if you’re not sure what you’re looking at. We did our best, and then after a few minutes, the professor focused the image just a hair. It was still blurry and unrecognizable, but a spot here and there started to look like something. We had to draw what we saw, but in a new drawing, referencing the first drawing if we felt anything in it was useful. The professor focused the image a hair more again, and we did a new drawing, over and over, until finally we could see the focused image. Amazing how it looked nothing like what we thought it was in the beginning.

Since we had to focus only what was recognizable and at least guess on what was not as we worked on each drawing, detail and accuracy showed up almost without trying because there was no rush to get it all at once. We simply worked with what we had at each stage. Everyone’s final drawing turned out hyper-accurate and thorough, and we were all so surprised and pleased with them that we collectively decided we didn’t hate the professor for putting us through that after all.

Writing stories is like that drawing lesson (for me, anyway). I start out with a blurry idea, and the more I work on it, the more things reveal themselves and start to fit with other things as I continually rearrange and revise them. Lots of detail and layers come forward - if I rushed through, I'd probably miss a lot of these, and the stories would be the worse, I think.

Once I stopped fighting my haphazard method of story discovery and just got on with writing what I did have clear to me (thank you, outlines and note-taking!), I started to get more writing done. I’ve accepted that my story ideas are lumpy blobs in the beginning and gradually work up to finished pieces that are nothing like I thought they would be when I started writing them. In fact, it’s rather neat to see where they end up, and it keeps me interested enough to keep coming back to the page, which is the most important thing, in the end, isn't it?

Writing frustrations are annoyingly clever that way.