I predicated my default writing process on having lots of time to work on things. I can engage in a long, sprawling drafting process that is focused on rewriting as I go, embracing the narrative dead ends, and spending days frowning at a passage that needs to resolve itself into something better.
It’s an approach that worked for me through several decades of writing, but in those decades I was time-rich even if I was dollar-poor. I could fly by the seat of my pants and still get things done because I’d structured my life to play to those conventions—organisation and planning were tools for other parts of my life.
There’s a school of thought that says once you’ve written one way for a long while, that becomes your process and there’s no point trying to switch it up. Another suggests that you basically switch up your process depending on the demands of your life and the projects you work on, and even a planner will pants like hell if a project demands it.
I’m frequently interested in the transitional shifts that kicked off changes for writers, whether those changes are real or merely a matter of perception. Dean Koontz started off as a planner, but often cites the transition to pantsing his way through a novel as the start of his reign as perennial best-seller – when he didn’t know what was coming, it was easier to write a thriller that surprised people. Chuck Wendig and Kameron Hurley have both claim to be natural pantsers, but talk about being happier with their productivity and the quality of the work when they learned the dark arts of plotting from screenwriters. Neil Gaiman appears to be one of nature’s pantsers and hasn’t necessarily changed that, but noticed he wrote differently when switching from drafting on a computer to drafting by fountain pen (intriguingly, if you download a copy of The Art of Neil Gaiman, there’s an awful lot of planning/ideating as he goes, it just happens in a notebook and focuses on short-term goals).
So I do tend to default towards you can learn new tricks as a writer rather than fuck off, I’m an old dog, and I’m completely open to switching up my process if I think it’ll teach me something or reshape my approach to work.
And from that perspective the search for a new routine is an opportunity. My routines have changed because of the new job, but so has my relationship to writing. Most people immediately leap to “I can do less work” due to the day job, but equally important is “there’s no longer an economic cost to failure.” This shifts both the scope and the ambition of creative projects, because the priority pyramid is in a state of flux.
Ergo my rule for the rest of October: don’t try to advance any drafts for the rest of the month, but do try to plan them. I’ve got two works in progress that I’m breaking down scene-by-scene, using techniques learned from a couple of different plotters of my acquaintance. One exercise (creating index cards with the prose equivalent of film’s INT|Location|Time) has already paid off – I could tell which scenes had under-developed settings by the description of the location on the card. At a glance, I can tell that the scene at The Last Crevasse bar is probably adequately developed, because I can tell you details about that setting off the top of my head.
Meanwhile, the scenes set in “Café” or “Corridor” need a bit more personality before I can consider them done.
My usual process would normally cover all of this – I’d write the draft and swoop back-and-forth fixing stuff as I went – but it would be a haphazard process and it’s easy to miss stuff. This gives me a bit more rigour to play with once I’m back at the keyboard for drafting in November.