Building a House of Words

When I taught English to middle schoolers, every unit (or quarter) involved several writing pieces, usually essays but also a couple of short stories. The pre-writing process took up a lot of the time devoted to these projects: breaking down the writing prompt; taking notes from the text and completing the outline, if it was an essay; and filling in the plot diagram, if it was fiction. I tried hard to emphasize this part of the assignment, telling the students, "If you outline it thoroughly and correctly, the essay or story will practically write itself." Unfortunately, many (if not most) of the kids fulfilled the pre-writing portion in a slapdash way, eager to get to the writing part and get it over with, as if it were a trip to the dentist and they were being brave by enduring it at all.

That should have been a fun process for me, being a writer who enjoys the preparation period of a writing project. But the students cared so little for the whole thing, it ended up being depressing and even painful. Then, I had to grade their finished products, and my sympathetic nature forced me to be gentle with the marks, because their writing was generally terrible. I'm not referring to their grammar, but rather to the structure and its effect on the overall presentation. Thus, in the end, I was proven right about the importance of outlining one's writing, for all the good it did.

The thing is, my belief in the need for a proper pre-planned structure is not universal among professional writers. There are some who fly by the seat of their pants, hope the road will lead them somewhere, and then revise heavily afterward. Others must know exactly where they are going; like my Uncle Tim when he's traveling, they have a carefully worked-out itinerary with estimated times for each activity and accompanying maps. J.R.R. Tolkien spent years (decades?) on the languages for his mythical Middle Earth; do you think he left any of the plotting for Lord of the Rings to chance?

I've said before that I wish I could've been a pulp writer, like those who were active in the first half of the last century (see A Penny a Word), but I don't know if I'd have been successful at it, because those guys had to produce like mad in order just to survive, and that called for a particular writing process. They internalized a basic formula for plotting, like the one developed by the great Lester Dent (author of Doc Savage), and then they used that as an unwritten guideline as they pounded out their prose. One pulp fictioneer, Tom Blackburn, wrote an essay in which he laid out how he'd developed a real published story: with the idea for a peculiar main character and a basic premise, he started writing, and as he came to a turn in the story, he'd ask himself questions, and the answers would determine which way he'd take the action from there. For him, this method kept things exciting, because he didn't know what would happen next, and so he figured the story would remain exciting for the reader.

I can safely assume that most pulp writers used the same basic method for producing stories. But, and this may seem cruel, how many of those key-pounders--even the successful ones--are remembered today, even by pulp fans? The answer to that will tell you if their method was the ideal one. In fact, the pulp scribes whose names outlasted those cheap magazines were far from the most prolific of the bunch; they plotted carefully, they wrote masterfully, they revised meticulously. That's how guys like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler were able to get out of the pulps and ultimately produce classic novels such as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep.

When I was a kid, writing not on assignment but for fun, I wrote kind of like the pulp fictioneers. I'd have a character or idea, and I'd scribble away feverishly until the little masterpiece was done. But, here's the thing: even at a tender age, I rarely started writing before the story was worked out in my head. I didn't physically outline, but I knew where I was going anyway. And the more you do that, the easier and more efficient it gets. So, there was still structure inherent in my process. There were times when I attempted a piece of fiction without being able to see the next curve in the plot, but those were just lazy exercises that began without even a solid character or the wisp of an idea. I'm sure it's no surprise to you that those "exercises" went nowhere and ultimately were not finished.

Some might ask, "Where's the fun if you know everything that's going to happen ahead of time?" Well, a lot of the fun for me is in discovering everything during pre-writing. Especially with scripts--comic, stage, or film--I take thorough notes and then outline meticulously, because the results of those scripts are visual and include a lot of directions for other people (artists, actors, directors) to carry out, thus requiring such careful planning.

With prose, I can be a bit more relaxed but not extremely so. I jot down my ideas for what I want to include in the story or novel, I do my research (trying not to get lost in it; see What I Don't Know Could Fill a Book), and then I outline by writing down each basic scene and turn in the plot. So, there's still some discovery in the actual drafting, but I'll never really start a story without having it pretty well worked out upstairs. So, I enjoy the whole process, but in the end the result will be a lot more fun for the readers if I've done the best I can before the story reaches them.

However, there is one type of writing that I can do without outlining first or knowing exactly where I'm going: these blog posts! Oh, the irony!

#fiction #writing