An Ever Evolving Process

As I near the end of the current Work in Progress, I find myself—as I always do at the end of a project—ruminating over what I have learned as a writer. Over on the Book of Face I posted this plaintive question – “When did I become the kind of writers who uses outlines and writes his scenes out of order?”

At the start of my career all those many 11 or so years ago I was a dedicated pantser—as in I wrote by the seat of my pants as the story took me. I didn’t outline. I didn’t plan or plot things out. I just let it happen and hoped for the best. It worked okay for me early, though some might say this is why I never had a break out into the big leagues (aka SFWA pro qualifying markets) as a short fiction writer.

But I was also a kept writer in those days. I was going to vocational rehab classes and the U of M, but I wasn’t working outside the house, not even part-time. I cannot express to you how much freedom I had to simply write as I wished. And because of that, I found myself not needing to make any major changes to the process.

Then we bought a home and Beloved Spouse (with my enthusiastic support) returned to grad school. Suddenly we were a poor grad student and disabled guy with a mortgage. I went back to work.

You guys might remember my time with the puppets. It was a disaster for me as a writer. I realize now what I needed to do was adjust my expectation of my writing time and to adjust my process, but I was still too much of a new writer to understand this, I just kept trying to bull ahead the way I always had, and I was miserable.

Then I left the puppets. Which was good for me as a writer, but it took forever for me to find work again, because hello, blind. Who wants to hire a freaking gimp? I did some growing and improving during that time, mostly because I stretched myself, sold to Carina Press and got to work with first-class editors, and had a better understanding of how blessed I was to have this much time to write.

And I say it was good for me as a writer, but looking back I think it wasn’t. The stress of being unemployed was getting to be too much on all of us. I took a full-time position in property management, became so stressed out by the job that I ended up in the hospital, was unemployed again, and then took a temp position at a major banking concern (which was actually a fairly nice job.)

We shall call this The Really Awful Time for me as a writer. Because I wasn’t writing; not much anyway. I couldn’t make the adjustment no matter how hard I tried. I knew I should have been able to. Other writers worked full-time, had lives, and wrote a novel or so a year plus short fiction and plus blogs, mostly under deadline. But I had stalled. The only thing that kept me sane was that I had a back-log of stuff to rewrite and submit, so I stayed working in that regard and stayed in front of readers, but behind the scenes I wasn’t producing much of anything new. And what I was writing was crap.

I handed this crap to my writers group recently and they let me know all the ways the story failed. I went back and reread it a few days ago, and I cringe that I ever let them see it. It’s a hot mess. Seriously. But if I never manage to fix that piece, if all I can do is set it aside and scrap it out for parts to put in in other stories, at least I was writing something during that awful time. I think that is what this piece is: something to make me feel like I was still a writer, even if it was dreadful, dreadful drek. I wrote it and I finished it. That’s worth something.

Which brings us to how my process is changing. I wrote the draft of a story called A Study in Violet, which Beloved Spouse has for First Reading. It is a straight homage to Holmsian mysteries and so it provided me with some structure, points, and notes I had to hit while still adding my own unique twists and voice. It isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good (not drek) and it helped me get the writing moving back in the right direction. I made a simple outline of the points and notes I needed to hit, and I wrote toward them.

Now here I am, once more employed part-time but unlike the situation with the puppets, I’m ready and able to learn some lessons as a write and grow into an opportunity. Rather than rant and rail about how I don’t have the time to write like I once did, I’ve changed my methods to fit my new life and schedule.

On the days I work I’m usually too tired and brain fried to commit fiction in the evenings, but I am able to sort out plot points, do research, create basic scene outlines and blocking, and consider what I’ve written up to that point, making notes of adjusts I need to make.

On the days I don’t work, I have all the notes and outlines in place so that I can simply sit down and write. This has been extremely freeing. On the two or so days a week I have for writing, I can apply all the previous work, sit my butt down, and just start writing—writing to whatever point in the plot/outline I’m working on. And if that isn’t working I go write a different scene, which usually jogs lose my problems in the scene that had stalled. So I don’t have as many writing days but on the whole, I’m nearly as productive as I was when I wasn’t working.

What’s more, this change in process has helped make writing fun again, because for a while it was becoming less and less fun as I struggled. The change in process also allowed me to simply be a better writer. I’m not spending as much time flailing. I don’t have that annoying habit of writing myself into corners. I can see the huge plot holes before I fall through them.

So I guess the take away is, if you are lucky you keep growing and stretching as a writer. You keep improving. You know – Reach. Grasp. Fail. Fall. Get up. Dust off. Try again.

Yeah. This.