When I started writing a couple of Octobers ago, I think my expectations were low. As I said in my previous post, I had tried to write before and the efforts had always fizzled, so how was this time going to be any different? I still don’t really have an answer as to why it was different. I had read about some authors who had been successful with self-publishing, so maybe the whole effort felt more doable? Maybe I had read enough books and had enough life experience that the stories finally started gelling? Whatever the reason, as the length of time that I had been writing daily stretched from days to weeks and then to months, there was no question that I was now writing and seemed to want to keep doing it.
There was a point where I was a little worried that maybe the spell would be broken. Over Christmas 2022, I talked to my brother about the story in my initial effort and I was disappointed to realize that it was not salvageable. At least by me. Having to throw away the story and characters I had created felt daunting at the time. However, after the holiday, I did just that, started again and kept going. My second effort is still far from where it needs to be, but it is a significant improvement from that first one.
As I moved through 2023, my thoughts changed from wondering whether I could write a complete story to what if I could write something worth publishing. Being an author had always seemed like something other people did, but the thought that I might be able to be one of those people excited me in a way few things have. I knew I was a long way from there now though, so I started looking for ways to improve.
My first stop was Brandon McNulty’s videos (link). Ever since taking one too many English literary criticism classes, I’ve deconstructed the stories I’ve read and watched, but McNulty showed me a way of looking at stories at a granularity that I had missed on my own. Characters and scenes and dialogue were now individual things that needed to be looked at individually to make sure they were serving the purposes of the story. The concept reminded me a bit of Poe’s unity of effect, but on a grander, and at the same time smaller scale.
Over the summer of 2023, I also went through Brandon Sanderson’s videos of his 2020 Creative Writing class (link). That all of those are available for free on YouTube is just an incredible resource. Now that I was developing an eye for it, I saw that there were many things I needed to be doing as an author that I just wasn’t. There were a few things I was, which was heartening, but more that I wasn’t. I also hadn’t thought about any part of the process past the actual writing part. Marketing, submitting, working with editors, publishers, they were all things that hadn’t even been on my radar. I didn’t have, and still don’t, any sense of how long it would take to become a published author, but I could feel the road lengthening as I listened. Publishing is still my ultimate goal, but I’ve accepted that it might be years away and that it might never happen. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to try.
One thing that Sanderson goes through in his videos is the gardener-architect author spectrum and his personal writing process, which tends towards the architect end. While I can see the benefit of his process, so far, I have found myself more of a gardener. When I think about it, it makes sense. I’ve been a software developer for almost 30 years at this point, and my approach has always been to keep coming at a problem until I find the solution or structure that feels right. I used to call it “finding the solution with some finesse.” There are definite downsides to this approach. First, it probably involves more rework than if I started with a more structured initial vision. It also starts to break down when trying to tackle enterprise-level software problems; there’s so much complexity that just looking for a “solution with some finesse” isn’t going to cut it. Both seem to have similar problems in writing. For coding, 30 years of experience means my intuition has had enough training to be decent at pointing me down the right track. While I hopefully will still be writing in 30 years, I’m trying to find ways to manage these problems before that.
One of the ways that I’m hopeful works do that is the process I’m currently using for the first draft of my second novel. The first time through the story, I just let things flow. I created the characters I needed, had them interact with each other in ways that seemed interesting at the time and let the plot move to a conclusion. Then I took a step back, thought through what I liked, what I didn’t, and where I needed to shore things up. After going through that and mapping out some arcs for the story and characters, I’m going back through, writing what I’m considering the “official” first draft. So far, it seems to be a positive experience.
I know I still have a long road ahead of me and that I’m going to need more than a few (no matter how good) videos to get me where I want to be as author, but for now I’m going to just keep writing.