On the structure of writing

[hrj]

I've been thinking about doing some musings on my fiction writing process, but it occurred to me to start with the things that are common across all my writing, not just fiction.

When I'm writing short things, I tend to go straight through, front to end. But when I'm writing long, complicated things like ... oh ... novels or dissertations or some of the hairier investigation reports, I usually want to write up the things I know now even if they depend on things I haven't figured out yet. So, for example, in my current fiction project (the one I'm not revealing plot details of yet), even though I'm writing more or less straight through from the start of the story, it's interspersed with things like place-holders for names I haven't come up with yet, asterisked terms where I want a different label for something but need to work it out further, notes to "describe X in more detail here" or "insert foreshadowing for event Y here" or simply "this is where Z happens when I know what it is".

But compare this with the investigation report I started working on yesterday that includes things like "the volume of tower water that can enter the system is limited by [insert technical details here], therefore as the purified water feed system enters the [technical name for initial chamber] with an internal water pressure of [pressure range] and the coolant water system has a pressure of [pressure range], the worst case intrusion rate is [insert calculation] and given a static resident volume in the still of [volume] and a minimum flush rate of [rate] the intruding coolant water would be entirely flushed from the system within [calculate time period]."

It's the same process, really.

Of course, there are times when the novel suddenly turns left and diverges from the existing skeleton, and there have been times when my initial understanding of an investigation had to be thrown out and rewritten from scratch. But in both cases it would have been harder to come to that understanding without having sketched out the whole to begin with.

Comments

[madbaker.livejournal.com]

George RR Martin once referred to authors who are architects and those who are gardeners. The architects build a structure and fill it in; the gardeners mulch and see what grows.

One is not superior to the other, except for individual effectiveness. I suspect I'd be an architect too.