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la_marquise) wrote2025-05-13 11:40 am
la_marquise) wrote2025-05-13 11:40 am
Entry tags:
On writing process and style
It's a truism that all writers are different and no-one has exactly the same process. Over the years, I've met writers who write detailed, scene by scene outlines and writers who start with a vague idea and a few opening lines. Some of us work out plot points on post-its or Scrivener peg boards. Some keep notebooks or ideas files. Some create playlists and moodboards. Some have complex rituals, others just sit down and start. I know writers who always create a first draft longhand, writers who work in bed, in garden sheds or in coffee shops. I know even more writers who vary, depending on circumstance and project.
I write both fiction and non-fiction, though rarely at the same time. A friend once observed to me that he found the two completely incompatible and needed a clear division between the two. I'm not quite in that category, although, again, it depends. Serious academic research takes up a lot of brain space and concentration and I've never been able to write the more literary end of my fiction if I also have an academic project on the go. On the other hand, I write non-fiction far faster than fiction. WIth history, at least, the article or book at the end is the final, often shortest stage. I've done all the research and the note-making and the thinking and the discussions. I'm just writing up. Again, though, this is me. I've had colleagues who find the writing stage slow and difficult.
I'm not an outliner: even with non-fiction, the most I do is come up with a list of chapter headings, with maybe a few key words about intended contents. WIth fiction, outlines trip me up. They feel too rigid, clsing down the creativity, the depth, the landscape of the book or story. I make running notes: in my long hand days, these were in the margins of whatever notebook I was using (usually Alwych All Weather, which I still prefer). This days I make them in bold at the front of the file. But I don't always remember to look at them. I also leave myself notes on scraps of paper, which I then lose or forget and rediscover months or years later and wonder at.
I don't always write in the same voice, either. With non fiction, a monograph or an article for a peer-reviewed journal requires a different style and tone to one intended for the popular audience. My first copy editor told me that I was unsually clear, even in the most technical sections, which I treasure as a comment and try to live up to. But at the same time I have peers who produce wonderful work in High Academic, and I enjoy that, too. It's just not how my thoughts tend to flow. (I can speak Post-Modern and Post-Structuralist if required, but I don't write it. this is at least in part because I'm an early mediaevalist and the sorts of source materials I work with don't lend themselves fully to these in terms of theoretical model -- too many absences and lacunae, which my personal academic sense of rigor feels it would be inappropriate to try and fill with models from theory.)
Fiction, though... Elizabeth Bear once said that all writers arrive with two skills already rooted. Mine are style and atmosphere: I feel my way into and through my books, reaching always for the emotional effect I want to create. Words are each of them layered and nuanced, bringing with them resonances from culture and context, history and daily use. No word is an island.
Flaubert, it is said, agonised over almost every word of Madame Bovary. Sometimes I know how he felt. Words matter and it makes me itchy when I can't find the right one. There are things I want to say that are unamenable in English. There are echoes I want to conjure. Words are beautiful and I want to use them to build structures worthy of their beauty.
So far, so literary -- and I am, alas, a literary fantasy author, in terms of style at least. It doesn't make for commercial books, which is not ideal. But I like Living With Ghosts and The Grass King's Concubine. I like how they sound and feel, even if I worry about my skill with plotting. My plots often go sideways, and that's not ideal.
Almost all my life, I've written stories and most of my childhood and teenage writing was essentially fanfic. I still have a lot of this stuff (no, not going up on AO3). From my mid teens onwards, it reads like me, in the way I stack and shape words and the games I play with grammar. Much of it is pretentious and annoying, and, well... (I once wrote a story in the style and language of Sir Thomas Malory, for instance. There's anotjher that's a literary allegory based on T S Eliot. They're appalling.) Every once in a while, I come across something I'd forgotteen I'd written, and, well, yes, that's my voice.
The Book of Gaheris has four different viewpoint characters, each narrating a section. They sound different, because each of the characters sounds different in my head. (The same is true of LWG and GGK, but the sections are more interwoven.) I always assumed that all my fiction writing was basically the same, however -- that the difference in character voice was somehow not the same as variation in style. Then Phil suggested I write a particular short story I was working on in my 'Gaheris voice'. Which... Well, it was a surprise. My writing is my writing. But I went and looked at the Gaheris material again (this was before I wrote the second two novellas or thought about trying to sell any of what I'd written in that background). It was me, yes, and it was the character, but it was also something further. It was demotic, somehow. It was that difference I already recognised from my non-fiction, between the technical and academic and the popular.
Not all The Book of Gaheris is in that mode: certain characters required a more literary tone. The thing I'm writing at present, though, is entirely in demotic voice. It reads, well, fun -- I tend to think my tone in fiction tends to the serious. It's fun to write. Maybe I'm changing as a writer. Maybe I'm just weird. I don't know. But what matters here, for me anyway, is that, finally, writing is once again fun.
I write both fiction and non-fiction, though rarely at the same time. A friend once observed to me that he found the two completely incompatible and needed a clear division between the two. I'm not quite in that category, although, again, it depends. Serious academic research takes up a lot of brain space and concentration and I've never been able to write the more literary end of my fiction if I also have an academic project on the go. On the other hand, I write non-fiction far faster than fiction. WIth history, at least, the article or book at the end is the final, often shortest stage. I've done all the research and the note-making and the thinking and the discussions. I'm just writing up. Again, though, this is me. I've had colleagues who find the writing stage slow and difficult.
I'm not an outliner: even with non-fiction, the most I do is come up with a list of chapter headings, with maybe a few key words about intended contents. WIth fiction, outlines trip me up. They feel too rigid, clsing down the creativity, the depth, the landscape of the book or story. I make running notes: in my long hand days, these were in the margins of whatever notebook I was using (usually Alwych All Weather, which I still prefer). This days I make them in bold at the front of the file. But I don't always remember to look at them. I also leave myself notes on scraps of paper, which I then lose or forget and rediscover months or years later and wonder at.
I don't always write in the same voice, either. With non fiction, a monograph or an article for a peer-reviewed journal requires a different style and tone to one intended for the popular audience. My first copy editor told me that I was unsually clear, even in the most technical sections, which I treasure as a comment and try to live up to. But at the same time I have peers who produce wonderful work in High Academic, and I enjoy that, too. It's just not how my thoughts tend to flow. (I can speak Post-Modern and Post-Structuralist if required, but I don't write it. this is at least in part because I'm an early mediaevalist and the sorts of source materials I work with don't lend themselves fully to these in terms of theoretical model -- too many absences and lacunae, which my personal academic sense of rigor feels it would be inappropriate to try and fill with models from theory.)
Fiction, though... Elizabeth Bear once said that all writers arrive with two skills already rooted. Mine are style and atmosphere: I feel my way into and through my books, reaching always for the emotional effect I want to create. Words are each of them layered and nuanced, bringing with them resonances from culture and context, history and daily use. No word is an island.
Flaubert, it is said, agonised over almost every word of Madame Bovary. Sometimes I know how he felt. Words matter and it makes me itchy when I can't find the right one. There are things I want to say that are unamenable in English. There are echoes I want to conjure. Words are beautiful and I want to use them to build structures worthy of their beauty.
So far, so literary -- and I am, alas, a literary fantasy author, in terms of style at least. It doesn't make for commercial books, which is not ideal. But I like Living With Ghosts and The Grass King's Concubine. I like how they sound and feel, even if I worry about my skill with plotting. My plots often go sideways, and that's not ideal.
Almost all my life, I've written stories and most of my childhood and teenage writing was essentially fanfic. I still have a lot of this stuff (no, not going up on AO3). From my mid teens onwards, it reads like me, in the way I stack and shape words and the games I play with grammar. Much of it is pretentious and annoying, and, well... (I once wrote a story in the style and language of Sir Thomas Malory, for instance. There's anotjher that's a literary allegory based on T S Eliot. They're appalling.) Every once in a while, I come across something I'd forgotteen I'd written, and, well, yes, that's my voice.
The Book of Gaheris has four different viewpoint characters, each narrating a section. They sound different, because each of the characters sounds different in my head. (The same is true of LWG and GGK, but the sections are more interwoven.) I always assumed that all my fiction writing was basically the same, however -- that the difference in character voice was somehow not the same as variation in style. Then Phil suggested I write a particular short story I was working on in my 'Gaheris voice'. Which... Well, it was a surprise. My writing is my writing. But I went and looked at the Gaheris material again (this was before I wrote the second two novellas or thought about trying to sell any of what I'd written in that background). It was me, yes, and it was the character, but it was also something further. It was demotic, somehow. It was that difference I already recognised from my non-fiction, between the technical and academic and the popular.
Not all The Book of Gaheris is in that mode: certain characters required a more literary tone. The thing I'm writing at present, though, is entirely in demotic voice. It reads, well, fun -- I tend to think my tone in fiction tends to the serious. It's fun to write. Maybe I'm changing as a writer. Maybe I'm just weird. I don't know. But what matters here, for me anyway, is that, finally, writing is once again fun.
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Non-fiction, on the other hand, I need a plan. I have the chapters worked out, I have a notion of what will be covered in each chapter; though I will almost invariably change this during the course of writing. My book on Chris Priest, for instance, I had a very detailed plan done in advance, wrote the first chapter, made a start on the second chapter, and ground to a halt. It wasn't working. I had to scrap what I had written, scrap the whole plan, and concoct an entire new plan on the go as I was writing the book. The writing, of course, is the easy part; I have very detailed notes (done in Evernote), and the notes grow organically as I am researching, so when it comes to putting words on the page a lot of what appears is simply copy and paste from my notes.
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I tend to do a lot of my analysis while writing, when it comes to non-fiction. I know what I'm thinking about and the shape of the interpretation, but the detail comes in when I'm writing the draft. Usually, I don't have to rework much, aside from in light of feedback from peers. But I'm a lot more confident of my abilities when it comes to non-fiction, and more certain that I know the material, the context and the existing scholarship.
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So interesting thinking about writers arriving with two skills already rooted. I have written a good deal of non-fiction which I consider successful if not wildly original, but no fiction of mine has ever been anything but imitative of my betters. But that seems more a failure of not knowing what I want to say in fiction than a lack of skill set.
no subject
All writing is to an extent a result of praice, I think. We all need different periods of time and experiences, but everyone has a voice that's distinctively them.