On Writing

These are some observations about writing.  They are based in part on my own experiences and in part on the studying I have done about the process of writing.  Here goes.

Writing is hard work.  Physically it is easy.  We now sit at a keyboard and hammer away.  If you are looking for a good way to take some pounds off, the writing process will be absolutely no help.  More active forms of exercise (or a good diet) will be required.  But the mental processes involved in writing are hard work.  I believe that is true even for those who are gifted writers.  It is one of those professions where the best advice is:

If you are not driven to do it, don't.

This is often applied to the profession of acting.  It is well known that in the acting business a tiny few make bales of money.  A larger but still small number of additional people make a bare bones living.  Everybody else starves to death or, worse yet, never even scores a single paid acting job.

Writing is not as bad as that but it is close.  There are probably a few more writers who earn enough at writing to do it full time than there are full time actors.  But neither group will ever constitute an employment category large enough to justify its own dedicated set of statistics.  There are just too few in either category who earn enough to do it full time.

And, as I said, writing is hard.  I dabble at it, mostly for my own interest and edification.  I feel a compulsion to "go on record".  And I am retired and well enough off that I can afford to.  But at no time did I ever consider trying to write for a living.  Sure, before I retired I wrote the odd study or position paper, but that was it.  The time I spent writing constituted such a small part of my work day that it did not merit a mention in the job description for any job I have ever held.

That said, I do have a brother who has managed to earn a living by writing.  That's an impressive feat.  Congradulations, Jim.

So what was my path from there to here?

The earliest writing related event in my life that I remember happened to me in the ninth grade.  I got a grade of C+ on an essay I wrote for class.  I talked to my teacher.  I said "I think it is a fair grade but, if it's not too much trouble, could you give me some pointers on how I could have done better?"

She returned the paper a day or so later.  She had slightly increased my grade (not what I asked for) but provided no guidance (the thing I actually had asked for).  For whatever reason, that was a very discouraging moment when it came to my interest in writing.  I decided then and there that writing was not my thing.  It was a long time before that changed.

Looking back on my first year in college I now realize that something happened then that should have given me encouragement as a writer but it didn't.  I started out as an "Arts and Sciences" major (I later changed to Engineering).  At the time there was a requirement that all A&S majors take three one credit English classes.  You took them in sequence and each class required you to submit a series of essays.

This was the late '60s and the cutting edge writing technology of the day was the typewriter.  Being a poor struggling college student I had a cheap "manual" (entirely mechanical - see any number of movies from the '30s and '40s if you are not sure what I am talking about) typewriter.  The key attribute of all but a few fancy (and expensive) electric "office" typewriters was that they didn't permit you to go back and correct anything.

Even the fancy models would only give you a way to fix the odd typographical error.  Whatever first hit the page, that's what you were stuck with.  Unless, of course, you were willing to retype the whole thing over from the beginning.  So that was a problem.  I was a terrible typist and I had a low opinion of my writing ability.  It would have been nice to be able to revise my first draft but at the time there was no practical way to do that.  Even if I was willing to retype the whole thing there was not enough time (see below).

The other thing I learned at the time was that words would not flow unless I was "on deadline".  If it had gotten to the point where if I typed like hell I had barely enough time to finish up the paper in time to turn it in at the start of class then the words flowed.  Before that it was all "writer's block" all the time.  Sitting down the night before, or even several hours before class started, was a complete waste of time.

As you can imagine, this did not lead me to believe that what I was turning in was any good.  In fact, one time I accidently left page 2 behind in my dorm room when I turned the paper in.  I almost threw it away figuring the paper was so bad it would not make any difference.  Fortunately, I changed my mind.  I turned the missing page in at the start of the next class and the instructor was gracious enough to accept it.  So the instructor at least had the whole paper to evaluate.

But if you did well enough in the first two classes you could skip the third one.  I did.  That should have told me that whatever I was doing was working better than I thought.  But it didn't.  I was happy to not have to take the third class but did not conclude, as I should have, that there was actually some hope for me as a writer.

I soon moved over from A&S to the School of Engineering, specifically the Electrical Engineering Department and, most specifically of all, to the Computer track.  I left the world of Arts and Sciences and all that entailed behind.  Well, not entirely.  The School of Engineering had a series of "social studies for Engineers" classes that us students were required to take.  The School of Engineering thought that it's graduates shouldn't be totally clueless with respect to "the finer things in life".

And I actually liked these classes.  I thought they did a good job of paring away a lot of the BS and focusing on the heart of the matter.  And one of these classes was called "Technical Report Writing".  It was only a one credit course but I thought it was excellent.

The course was organized around a number of questions and observations.  These were designed to focus you on what was important, not about the technical details of whatever you were writing about, but on how to make your written communication effective.  And the most important of these was "Who is your audience?"

The object of a report is to communicate information effectively.  To do so it is important to focus on who will be reading the report.  What do they know?  What don't they know?  What do they need to learn?  These are critical questions.  You can't answer them unless you first know who your most important readers will be.  Then you must figure out how to answer these questions with respect to those people.  I very much took that lesson to heart.

And a good many years later I found myself writing a series of reports, explainers, and recommendations as part of my job.  The key member of the audience for these writings was the IT Director.  So I did my best to answer the above questions as it related to him.

Then a magical thing happened.  He stopped by one day and said "I like your reports.  Keep them coming."  That turned my life around when it came to how I felt about writing.  I now believed I could do an at least adequate job and I no longer feared writing.  Of course, the technology had advanced light years since my Freshman College days.  It was now easy to "revise and extend" to your hearts content.  And we now had spell-check.

So I have internalized that experience from my college days.  It is now "put something down, anything.  You can always fix it later."  I no longer worry if my first draft is good or not.  It is only a starting point.  I think I am a good editor.  I can figure out what's working and what isn't.  Then I can set about fixing what needs improvement.  And, by the way, spell-check is a good starting point.  But it catches far from everything.

If the word on the page is the wrong word but it is spelled correctly a spell-checker will not flag it.  So you have to go through your writing to make sure the word on the page is the one you intended and not some correctly spelled but entirely inappropriate word.  For instance, I often type "form" when I mean "from".  A spell checker is completely happy with "form".

So when I am composing one of these blog posts I start by just banging something out.  Sometimes this first draft works pretty well except for the odd word that got past the spell checker and perhaps a few other things that are pretty easy to spot and fix.  But some first drafts require a lot of rework.  It just depends on the subject and how the juices are flowing that day.

And I used to be able to compose, revise, and publish one of these posts in a single long session.  Now I find it often takes me two days to complete a first draft and then whip it into decent shape.  (This piece is taking about an average amount of editing and rework.)  And, since I do this mostly for my own interest and edification, at some point I decide "it's close enough" and hit the "Publish" button.

Is it the best it could be at that point?  No!  But I want to avoid the "this is getting to be more trouble than it is worth" stage and that involves deciding that "enough is enough" and letting the world see whatever warts may remain.  If I was doing this for a living I couldn't get away with that.  But, if I was doing this for a living, I would have an editor to help me out.  Trust me.  Editors perform a valuable service.

And along the way I have developed an interest in the art and craft of writing.  I have read some books and I regularly listen to a podcast called "Writing Excuses".  The final line of every episode is "you are out of excuses - now go write".  I don't write fiction.  But let me pass along some of what I have learned about writing fiction.  Why?  Because it's fun.

There are two basic approaches to writing fiction.  One approach is called "discovery" writing and the other is called "outlining".  Most writers are not pure one or the other but they tend to lean more heavily toward one approach over the other.

And lots of writers use one approach in some situations and the other approach in others.  Brandon Sanderson, one of the "Writing Excuses" regulars, is an outliner when it comes to the overall structure and most of the plot of his books.  But he does a lot of discovery writing to develop and fill out his characters.  This "one from column A and one from column B" approach is very common.  But I am going to ignore that for the moment and explore the writing process used by two popular and successful authors.

John Grisham is an outliner.  I heard an extended interview he once gave in which he talked at length about his writing process.  He keeps a file.  He puts every idea he comes across or thinks up, good, bad, or indifferent, and big or small, into the file.  Then when he sits down to start a new book he combs through the file.  He is looking for one or two big ideas he can hang a book on.  This is very obvious if you look at his books.  Here's a one sentence summary of several of them:

A Time to Kill - What if someone murders a guilty person who is likely to get away with it?
The Firm - What if a "respected and legitimate" law firm is actually a front for the mob?
The Pelican Brief - What if someone murdered a Supreme Court Justice to hide a crime?
The Client - What if someone know something dangerous to the mob and it was a kid?

You get the picture.  He starts out with one or two big ideas.  Then he goes through his file a second time looking for small ideas he can use to spice the book up and keep it from being a straight line march from crime to conviction.  Then he outlines his story.  He puts down a summary of the important content of each chapter.  It may only be a single sentence.  At most it is a short paragraph.

Once he has about 60 of these chapter summaries he is ready to sit down and start writing.  He works on one chapter at a time and not necessarily in sequence.  He expands his short summary out to a full chapter.  He adds description and detail.  He may also add extraneous detail.  There are two key points to keep in mind while he is writing.  The first is to make sure that whatever was in the summary ends up in the chapter.  The second is that none of the "filler" material screws up any of the rest of the outline.

Occasionally he will run into a serious problem when writing a chapter.  This may necessitate revising the outline.  And this in turn may necessitate rewriting some chapters that have already been written.  He tries to avoid this and, I presume, he is generally successful.  And sometimes he has to abandon an idea because he can't figure out how to make it work.

But this almost always happens at the outline stage.  At that point he doesn't have that much invested because he has yet to write a single word of the actual book.  Abandoning what originally seemed like a good idea but that ultimately did not pan out comes with only a modest cost.  Fortunately, this has rarely happened.  And, when it comes to expanding his chapter description into a full blown chapter, he rarely runs into trouble.  And when he does usually only a small part of the rest of the book needs to be rewritten.

Someone whose approach is the compete opposite is Lee Child, author of the "Jack Reacher" books.  Child let Andy Martin follow him around for a year while he wrote "Make Me".  The result is a very interesting book called "Reacher Said Nothing:  Lee Child and the Making of 'Make Me'".  Child, whose real name is James D. "Jim" Grant, started out in TV in the UK.  This gave him an excellent visual sensibility.  And that informed his approach to writing the Reacher books.

Everything starts as an image.  In "Make Me" he started by imagining it is eleven PM.  A train has just pulled into a station of a "wide spot in the road" town in the middle of the American prairie.  This is a very evocative image and the prose description he creates from it gets the book off to a good start.

A mostly dark train rolls into a mostly dark station with its windows all lit up.  The station itself consists of pools of light separating by the vague outlines of buildings that can barely be made out.  Now throw in a couple of mysterious characters as Child does.  And, of course, Reacher.  If he isn't present there is no book.  So Reacher gets off the train.  Why?  Because that's what he does.  He looks around and chapter one is now in the can.

Who are these people and what's going on?  At this point Child has no idea.  But he moves on to the next scene and the next chapter.  Reacher needs someplace to sleep for the night.  So that gets us down the street and into a seedy motel.  And some more mysterious characters are introduced.  What are they up to?  We don't know and, at this point, Child doesn't either.

The next day Reacher gets up and wanders the town.  That gives Child more opportunities to turn images of what Reacher might see into prose.  And it gives Child more opportunities to introduce more characters and have them do interesting things.  And, since this is an "action" book, at various points Reacher gets into fights, which he inevitably wins.  Why?  'Cause that's just the kind of guy he is and we love him for it.

This process of "where would Reacher go next?" and "what would he see?" and "who would he meet?" and "what would they do?" continues.  Child keeps making it up as he goes along.  He has a strong visual sense so he keeps maneuvering Reacher into interesting places and situations.

Reacher has to come across good guys, or more likely girls, that he can defend and protect, and bad guys that he can get into fights with.  But at this point the construction of the book is driven by this process of stringing together interesting scene after interesting scene.  And each scene starts out as a picture in Child's imagination.

Somewhere around the middle of the book Child stops and reviews what he has written so far.  The two problems he has to solve at this point are "who are the main bad guys?" and "what are they up to?".  Once he settles on the answers to these questions the rest of the book starts to take shape.

This means that Child is now more constrained.  He still has a lot of options but he must eventually maneuver Reacher into a situation where we can get to the climax, the big fight in which he defeats the bad guys.  Finally, in true Western Movie style, he rides (the bus or train or walks or hitchhikes) off into the sunset in the last chapter.

Child prides himself on writing the book in sequence from beginning to end.  And he almost never goes back and makes substantial revisions to earlier parts of the book.  It happens but not often.

In the outline method the author knows where she is going before she writes the first word of the first sentence.  That is restrictive but it results in a coherent book that seems to have a sense of where it is going from start to finish.  Discovery writing allows for more creativity, at least in the early parts of the book.  At that point there are literally no restraints.  But it may be hard to get to a satisfactory conclusion and for the book to have a clear "thru line".

Child is good enough to pull it off but most writers aren't.  And the kinds of books Child writes make it easier to hide the fact that he has literally made it up as he went along.  So most writers stumble into the outline method for creating the spine of their book after repeatedly writing themselves into a corner they can't find a way out of.  Child is one of the few writers who seems to be consistently able to "work without a net".

But notice that there is an "outline" to Child's work.  Reacher starts off somewhere.  He wanders around and gets involved.  At some point he figures out who the bad guys are and defeats them.  Then he rides off into the sunset.

It is certainly not as detailed an outline as the one Grisham uses.  On the other hand, I suspect that Grisham does a lot of discovery writing at the chapter level.  He knows the chapter needs to hit a couple of key beats.  But it also needs some local color and some action, much of which will not end up contributing anything to the final resolution.  That leaves a lot of room for discovery writing when filling out the details of the location, the characteristics of minor characters who will not return, and so on.

So now that I have become an expert in the writing of fiction am I about to go out and create the next great American novel, or at least a successful thriller?  No!  As I said previously, writing he way too much work.  And this blog is more than enough to scratch my writing itch.

Finally, some homework.  The "Writing Excuses" podcast always assigns homework right before enunciating their sign-off line.  Your assignment is to pick a book.  It has to be a work of fiction that was written since say 1980.  (This outliner/discovery dichotomy was well known among writers by then.)  And it must NOT have been written by Sanderson or Grisham or Child.  Read the book and  determine if the author was primarily and outliner or a primarily a discovery writer.

You don't have to actually turn your homework in.  (Being a teacher, someone who actually cares whether someone else does their homework, is another of those "much harder than I want to work at this point in my life" professions.)  Instead, we will operate on the "honor system" here.  So, you are the only person who will actually know if you did it or not.  We'll just assume you did it and got it right.  Also, since this is not a blog about how to write fiction you don't have to "now go write".  Unless, of course, that's what you want to do.