How can I Tell What I Think Till I Read What I Write?

[NoJo]

I used to work with a guy who was an all-round creative - he sculpted clay, painted, drew, etched, carved wood and stone, played music, and much more. Amazing guy.

He once gave me a very succinct explanation of the difference between carving a model in stone and sculpting one in clay: With clay, you're free to add, change and subtract as you go, but with stone-carving, you need to visualize the finished work before you even start.

My style of writing, perhaps due to my inexperience or lack of confidence, is like sculpting in clay. I write paragraphs, move them around, delete them, re-read, fix stuff here and there, re-read again, until a narrative starts to form.

Like the old lady quoted by E.M. Forster, How can I Tell What I Think Till I Read What I Write?

Are there any authors here who don't use this iterative approach, but, like stone-carving, visualize the story more or less completely before starting to write?

 

[sirhugs]

I have heard sculptors say that the finished work already exists within the material, ad their art consists simply of exposing it...

 

[PennameWombat]

I used to work with a guy who was an all-round creative - he sculpted clay, painted, drew, etched, carved wood and stone, played music, and much more. Amazing guy.

He once gave me a very succinct explanation of the difference between carving a model in stone and sculpting one in clay: With clay, you're free to add, change and subtract as you go, but with stone-carving, you need to visualize the finished work before you even start.

Not being a smart-ass, but did he ever discuss using clay to create an ‘outline’ - a model - of what he’d eventually do in stone? I’ve read about the ability of carvers to look at a piece of rock and envision what they’d end up with but I don’t have that skill.

My style of writing, perhaps due to my inexperience or lack of confidence, is like sculpting in clay. I write paragraphs, move them around, delete them, re-read, fix stuff here and there, re-read again, until a narrative starts to form.

Like the old lady quoted by E.M. Forster, How can I Tell What I Think Till I Read What I Write?

Are there any authors here who don't use this iterative approach, but, like stone-carving, visualize the story more or less completely before starting to write?

The words you’ll often hear or read are pantsers versus plotters.

Pantsers “fly by the seat of their pants” and their writing builds as it goes although it’ll be built around ideas. Your approach fits here and you’re in good company, not only here but in the broad world of writing.

Plotters create a detailed outline and work with that until they’ve laid out their story. Then they fill in the blanks.

You’ll find all sorts likely to eventually respond here. In the broader world, Stephen King and George R.R. Martin are held to be exemplars of pantsers. King claims he’d be too bored to write if he knew what was going to happen. OTOH, John Grisham states he works to a strict outline. The collective that is James Patterson work from detailed outlines provided by Patterson.

Some references discuss gardeners. These are authors who use an outline but not so detailed as a plotter and “things grow or change” as they go along. Descriptions I’ve read of J.K. Rowling seem to put her in this category.

I’m rarely a plotter. I often have the flow of my story in mind but almost never do a detailed outline. I do occasionally do a rough one, so fit into the gardener category. But often I dive in with a couple of characters, a location and let it rip. That led to one of my recent stories Through the Woods. I had a man and a woman standing in a copse of trees alongside a river in partially-ruined city. Who were they? Why were they there? What would happen next? I had none of that so I just... wrote it.

My Winter Holidays 2020 entry OTOH was definitely ‘gardened.’ I had the flow from the beginning but there were some definite ‘rip this plant out and put this one in’ switches along the way.

 

[Kumquatqueen]

The classic plotters vs pantsers divide?

I tend to have a tiny plot bunny which I write down and then slowly build layers of dialogue and character and plot and place all around it, then shave off all the bits that don't add to what the story has become.

So my most recent story started with "I have one word of advice.""What?""Velcro." (Ok, it started with a trip to the DIY store and seeing these perfect straps reduced to 10p a packet, clearly a sign from above that my bondage life could be improved)

Who would say that? To whom? In what environment? Scribble, scribble, edit, edit, repeat...

 

[BobbyBrandt]

The words you’ll often hear or read are pantsers versus plotters.

Pantsers “fly by the seat of their pants” and their writing builds as it goes although it’ll be built around ideas. Your approach fits here and you’re in good company, not only here but in the broad world of writing.

Plotters create a detailed outline and work with that until they’ve laid out their story. Then they fill in the blanks.

I have always been a "plotting pantser".

My stories and characters are planned, and the story stays generally true to the outline. But, as in life, my characters frequently change and develop a bit as they meet and interact with other characters. This sometimes leads to parts of the story following the characters rather than the other way around.

Sometimes in researching factual details, I will discover some information that I think adds to the story, and this will also affect the original course.

 

[galaxygoddess]

I do all kinds of things to get my stories on the page.

Most commonly, I'll write out a synopsis, and then "open the umbrella" so to speak on each part.

What I mean by that, is I'll write out a sentence, then that descriptive sentence becomes a scene. Its not really an outline, half the time it's not even a guideline. It's just "X happens. The Y Happens. Then Z Happens." Then I go back and pull a sentence and make it into a full scene. Sometimes I use x y and z, other times y sounded stupid, so out the window it goes.

The novel I'm currently trying to publish started off as a short synopsis. I wrote maybe the first three chapters, then I started free writing, having absolutely no idea where I was going with it until I was done. Then I just kept fleshing out each part until there was more to it.

My Zombie story... oh I'm out lining the hell out of that one. I am doing research on each part, I am writing sentences for scenes. It started out a short synopsis, but what I want to do with it is requiring me to really plan the crap out of it.

My art teacher story, which I want to post on lit, is straight up flying by the seat of my pants trying to get the story out as I see it in my head. sure I got a gist of an outline, but really, it's just a one off as I go.

 

[SamScribble]

I'm a confirmed pantser. A bit late for me to change now.

 

[yowser]

The trouble with pantsing

The pantser's curse however, is that now that you have brought these conjured filaments of characters to life (golems?) they commandeer your head, and start yammering around at each other, doing things you hadn't planned on, and before you know it you've got a mess on your hands.

Almost like viruses, high-jacking your cranial DNA.

 

[oggbashan]

I tend to have an idea that is more than an outline but as I write, the details develop so I am a mix between a sculptor and a clay modeller.

 

[shivadancer]

I think this article has some parallel categorizations;

https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/12/zadie-smith-writing-that-crafty-feeling/

 

[SimonDoom]

I would describe my story-writing style as somewhat like that of the stone sculptor. A story is not a linear thing for me, where I start at point A and move forward. It's more like a painting. I have an idea of the whole and before I get far along I know almost exactly what I want the ending to be. So I write the story with an ending in mind. I never, ever write as a "pantser" as some call it -- start writing and just see where things go. I know where I want to go and the task of the story writing is to get there as artfully as I can.

 

[NoJo]

Neither do I. After reading what "pantser" is, that's totally NOT how I write, yet neither do I plot out the entire story. Endings are really important to me, and so is exposition. I usually have both the ending and the story arc in my head when I start. But I don't have all the scene, or even the characters that clear in my head, they come into focus through endless fiddling. Most of my stories, in mid-draught, are mainly formatted strike-thru - meaning I don't know where they belong in the story, if at all, but I don't want to delete them, in case they could be edited into something meaningful

 

[SamScribble]

I am 'pantsing' a story at the moment. It’s a pretty good example of how I typically work.

The genesis of the story was a tale a chap told at a dinner party more than forty years ago. The tale was both salacious and amusing. It was also surprising. Perfect dinner-party fare.

There was no doubt that the teller of the tale was ‘singing for his supper’, but the story just might have had an element of truth to it. (Several years later, I asked a chap who might have been in a position to know, what he thought the possibilities were that the story was true. ‘Gosh. Hard to say,’ he said. ‘But it wouldn’t surprise me.’)

I began by writing a version of the dinner-party story. And then I needed to answer a couple of questions that I decided were best answered before the story even got underway. So I penned a lead-in paragraph or two. The lead-in paragraphs also gave me a couple of other opportunities – which I gratefully accepted.

As I say, I heard the original tale more than forty years ago and, while my long-term memory is pretty good, it’s not that good. So there was an opportunity to ‘imagine’ a couple of scenes.

With fifteen hundred or so words on the page, I realised that there were opportunities to tweak the ‘tone of voice’. And so I did. About five hundred words later, we arrived at the carnality.

In keeping with anecdotal nature of the story, I decided that it was best not to be too graphic. It was a story with some sex, for goodness sake. The sex was important, critical even, but it was not sex with a hint of story. In fact, initially, I wrote too much sex. Some of it had to go. And part way through the pruning process, the ending just ‘popped’ into my head. I’m not finished yet, but I now know how the story begins, how it ends, and how it gets from the first word to the last.

Wish me luck.

 

[lovecraft68]

Most of my smut seems to pretty much flow and editing is mostly grammar or maybe losing'/adding a few words here and there

But in my more serious work, I have more of what I call the Jenga approach, I write what I feel at the moment, then end up rearranging the order of the chapters, then paragraphs within them, that work is more like a puzzle.