Among the many strange things I get asked — and other writers get asked — is how we do what we do. I.e. how we create the stories, and stay on track and write them and all.
Now, normally when I’m asked this I’m at a panel, where I’m under writ to tell a lot of lies, provided I make them entertaining. Also, on principle, I’m supposed to sound like a professional who know what she’s doing. Of course, acting like a pro should be easy after 30 years or so of being published (okay, 25 years just about in novels. But yeah, about 30 from first semi-pro short story.) And if you believe that, I have some primo Florida swamp I’d like to sell you at a really good price.
I often wonder, though, if my fellow writers lie like moth eaten rugs at this panels. Because they make the whole thing sound so rational, so controlled. “Well, I wanted to write a book about the manufacture of bells in the planet Korud, so, I thought, how do I wrap an adventure around that?” And we all smile and nod sagely as someone explains how he researched the manufacture of bells for five months, then went to a Buddhist monastery and sat contemplating the metalness of bells, before the idea of having pirates come to the planet and remove the bells, and then our hero….”
I know I lie. I lie a lot about the writing process, when I want to sound like I did things for a reason. Well, and when I worked for Trad Pub. Because you don’t want your editor and publisher to think you’re a complete loon. But more and more I just tell the truth.
And the truth is “this thing isn’t fully under my control.”
Now, there are parts I can and must control: like getting my butt in chair and working till the book is done. That’s never free and never easy. Particularly since we’re going through one of those cycles (does anyone else experience this in cycles?) where everything is breaking or weird stuff happening pretty much every day, so that sitting down for even an hour or two to do the blog is a pain in the pattotie, much less time to finish stories. But — ahem — that’s something I’m trying to deal with. As I said, it goes through cycles like this, then goes back to normal. But particularly until I hit the mid-point which is the down-slope of a novel, it takes will power and determination.
But how do I choose what to write? How do I calibrate the world building, and fine tune the details, and–
Uh.
There are exceptions. I mean, I’ve mentioned that I did a lot of write for hire, and obviously those I got either a concept or an outline. And yeah, I know how to work from there, because when I first started writing and had absolutely no self confidence, so I followed whatever the last how-to book told me to do.
Which means I can outline, and get approval on outline, or revise, or recast the concept. I mean, that’s definitely a way to work.
But it’s just not the way it’s natural for me to work.
The way it’s natural for me to work is for the story to come to me. Now, sometimes it’s the full story. I start “hearing” it far off, like I need to tune to it better. Like I’m some kind of ill-tune radio. And sometimes I take three or four starts, before I can make the book sound clear. But once it’s clear? Then I run with it. I just have to type as fast as it’s dictated.
Those are amazing. Because it’s like having a vivid dream.
I thought this was the weirdest way of writing a book, btw, until I accidentally heard a call between older professionals — the kind that are oh, so rational on panels — and realized I have it easy. it’s a day dream, but I get neither visual nor auditory hallucinations. For which the good Lord be thanked.
Other times, and more normal, I get a character, and I have an idea of what happened to the character and what the character’s story is, but I have to figure out where to start it from and how to spin it out. This process is akin to looking at a tangle of thread, and trying to figure out where to start spooling it out.
Once it spools out, it’s just a matter of staying with it, laying the ground work, till it reaches the middle and runs downhill, and I have to run to keep up with it. (No, it doesn’t mean the tension decreases. From the middle, it normal increases to climax, but you know? It’s just where I can see everything to the end, with every detail.)
But there are weird things that happen that give the impression one is actually receiving the story from a parallel universe, and that the story has several parallel universes of its own, where things are slightly different. The reason I say this is because sometimes, when I resume a series after an hiatus, or go back to one of my early, never written worlds, things have changed. And they’re the sort of things that would be different in a parallel universe. No, it’s not bad memory, because these are usually people I never wrote, but knew about while writing, or a world I never penned. And the differences are weird… someone’s car will be different. But it’s a car they almost bought last time I checked in. Or the sibling order in a family is upended. Or something like that.
Anyway, Kate Paulk and I, years ago, called this process of writing “gateway writing.” The world/characters/plot just show up through the gateway, and what we do is more akin to shamanistic channeling of something that arrives almost via extra-sensory process, or some kind of woo woo thing. (And we all know how I feel about woo woo.)
It is particularly spooky when I find that I’m going wrong on a novel, because I have a dream that sets it right, whatever it happens to be. And that’s often something I’ve been avoiding writing because, well…. I don’t want to kil that character. Or I don’t know how to write a battle or whatever. And then I dream it, and it’s like someone smacked me upside the head with “not that way, this way.”
Anyway, yeah, you can write things without them coming that way. Or at least i can. but it’s not as much fun and it takes considerably more effort. And anything being written like that is subjected to being displaced by something out of the gateway.
Also I swear the gateway is trying to get me killed. it’s like the things it kicks up are guaranteed to make me hated by both sides of the political spectrum and possibly other sides no one ever even thought of. And sometimes I wonder “Why me?”
Because it seems everyone else has this thing perfectly under control, right?
And then I decided to re-read Phillip Jose Farmer’s world of Tiers. And I hit red Orc’s rage. it’s hard to explain, but a psychiatrist at some point decided that he could use the world of tiers to have patients do guided imagery in (because the concept, if you don’t know, is of creators of their own universes.)
And because of this, there is what is obviously conversation from that reflects his talk with the psychiatrist.
The book is amazingly clunky, I think, some of it because of some outdated setting and such. But to me it was fascinating.
If I had to guess I’d say Phillip Jose Farmer got that through a gateway. (It also seemed to be his very first world.)
Anyway does any of you out there know what in heck I’m talking about? Or is this one of those “Just you Sarah,” situations?
And what’s the over-under on my gateway/muse/whatever you want to call it getting me killed before much longer?
Mad Genius Club 
30 responses to “This Thing Isn’t Entirely Under My Control”
I’m only 10 books into this whole thing. On my first, after a hopeless beginning couple of chapters, I looked up plot structures, got some concept of what might work, outlined for a while, and got ‘er done.
But after that, the feel of that structure in the story-telling just sort of… seeped in, and my subconscious did something like, “Oh, that’s what we’re looking for. Well, OK then — when I don’t send her random dreams, I’ll just noodle along on something she’s writing and point out where it went wrong and what should happen instead.”
I don’t now how many little note pads by the bed I’ve exhausted since then, when I wake up at 3:00 AM and hastily scribble down the real relationship of character A to character B, or what hidden part of their background should be relevant, etc. My subconscious just keeps chewing on it, and everything I read contributes its bit. (Just this morning something I read last night reminded me that my faux-Regency fantasy should refer to “Service Stairs” rather than “Servants’ Stairs”.)
I don’t even outline anymore, not really. I think of the story in 4-act structure terms, even if the details aren’t fully fleshed out until I get to them, and the raw tentpoles are all that’s there when I start, and sometimes only just. I monitor wordcount as I write so I can tell about how balanced the acts are in simple length as I go along, which helps keep things taut.
This is just one approach — there are many others. I suspect everyone’s first book process is a roll of the dice, a slog by whatever means necessary, but it’s like going to the gym — your brain learns how to do it better with practice, and if your first attempt at taming things doesn’t work, try another one. With luck, you’ll be doing this a long time… might as well get comfortable with it.
I don’t know, because I was writing in elementary. BUT I needed to learn AMERICAN cultural expectations for stories, so I had to study that.
For me I have characters that just go and do things:
“Ok, MC’s kid has been kidnapped. What does everyone do? Ok, makes sense, makes sense… What do you mean *you stab her in the back?* Please don’t sit there smiling smugly…”
“I mean, I kind of really don’t want to write that sort of scene anyways, but you’re an unrepentant monster that eats people and this, tactically makes no sense. Why are you just letting the hostage kid go? That just doesn’t… Why are you sticking your tongue out at me? That’s… what?”
“Ok, so the shape shifting drifter has been living in the wilderness that used to be part of the domain of the deposited aztec god thing. There’s something weird about the way they interact, but they’ve surely met long before now and have a history. Ok, how did they meet? Oh, they’re married… That explains it. Guess I’m writing this now…”
I really need to get a butt in seat routine going again. Had a great and glorious plan to stop at a local library and write for a while after work. And got done with work last night at 7:24…
And I just figured out the climax for the first act, and got it mostly written down. She stabs the antagonist with a hatpin. That character’s headspace is so radically different it’s kind of a rush any time I’m able to get properly into it.
Anyone else find that with certain characters?
oh, sure. When the book is flowing, and you’re on top of it? it’s a crazy rush. Better than drugs. It’s why I’m going nuts with the interruptions.
I think a lot of Tolkien’s unpublished work gives off the same “AUs in a setting” vibe: the multiple choice backstories of Gil-Galad and Galadriel, Trotter vs Strider, Originally Flat Arda versus Astronomically Correct Arda. I feel like a case could also be made for some of Jane Austen’s characters: Captain Wentworth is Frank Churchill with a profession and a girlfriend capable of ditching him for his own good (rather than, briefly, for her own good), Sir Thomas Bertram is a Mr. Darcy who married badly umpty years ago.
For myself, it’s kind of a Mortal Kombat thing. There’s always a bunch of potential stories floating around in the background noise of my mind. Some of them are very obviously not something I’m cut out to tell (if it requires complex nonlinear storytelling it really needs to go bother someone else). I put them down as ideas in the notebook, do some preliminary research if I feel like it, and a lot of times that’s enough to get them off my chest. If I keep coming back to particular ideas and they keep evolving, eventually one of them will grab my attention hard enough to get written. Because I’m a slow writer who’s not very good at dividing her attention between projects, I joke about the pre-writing phase being like Highlander: there can be only one. Once I’ve committed to a setting, starting point, ending point, and characters, I can usually just follow the characters’ actions to their conclusion.
Sometimes I’m making apparently rational decisions about story: the POV character ought to talk with this minor character because he’s the one best positioned to tell her about X, Y, and Z which led to the hostage situation she’s about to witness. Sometimes I’m making aesthetic decisions about story: let’s handle this problem Captain Nemo style. Sometimes it sure looks like the story has a mind of its own, like the time I found out, rather late in the proceedings, that the heroine was freaked out by something about the hero that I personally would probably find more intriguing than freaky if I were in her shoes.
This is why I’m trying to write.
I get scenes, and I “know” the people, and I want to nkow more…and also share the nifty with folks without sounding completely insane.
Well, since you asked:
Is shit failing coming in waves or cycles? OH yeah. Nothing breaks for months or even years, then everything goes TU within a month… And my only hope is that I saved enough during the quiet times to get through the next set of catastrophes. (lately, that hasn’t been as much of an issue, but there was a time… Oh yeah, there was a time when it was canned tuna stuff and burger for a couple of months, while paying minimums on everything, and writing checks on Wednesday that shouldn’t hit it to the bank until the money got there on Friday.)
On the bigger question: It’s not that I get a “gateway” piece as you explain it– I often get “dictated to” and it comes in fits and starts. One of my shorts, Vulcan III at somewhere around 14K words, I wrote in a day, edited in four hours, sent it off, and sold it immediately. (Full disclosure, Declin asked me to put something together for Luna (anthology) but I suspect he wanted a ‘thrope story. What he got was hard SF.) I always thought it was hubris or bullshit when I read authors saying “my characters talk to me.” Of course that was before I started writing.
I’ll often have to figure out how something works, be it choreographing a fight scene, or planning a battle, to the point that I’ve had the wife or a buddy work through it with me to see if the scene makes sense for a fight scene, and plot out the ship’s movement and position for a battle (right now, I’m writing a space battle keeping the position of a carrier, two frigates, three cruisers, and a Scout Ship on one side, v a single Scout ship on the other) to the point that I have what we called a “Mo-board” or Manouvering Board set up to track stuff. But once I have it figured out, it just goes, and I just have to keep out of the way.
The downside is when it doesn’t “go” for some reason, I’m high and dry, trying to force the issue. Or I’ll get fifteen minutes of story time down, and everything comes to a stop as if the dictator has gone off to the kitchen for coffee.
“Declin”? or Declan, as in Declan Finn?
yes, I was typing fast
Well, storytellers are likely to summarize experiences over a period of time as a story. And, if you are marketeer enough to have people asking for your explanation of where you get your stories, you might make that story a sales pitch.
Which is not going to be served by inspiring an ‘Ick. Crazy. Get it away, get it away!’ reaction.
There’s a lot of variation in thinking patterns in general, but a lot of that gets papered over. A lot of social behavior is learning to generate and interpret patterns, and a common approach is to conclude that everyone in the in group is as consistent on the inside as they are on the outside when it comes to the markers that the group cares about.
‘Educated, rational, sane’ is a common thing to try to signal.
But the realities and variations may have some interesting surprises for us when we go look.
Mathematicians, and in particular researchers who did very important things, versus what they were nominally doing at the time.
Media shorthands may wildly diverge from what a deep study of that biography would show cases of.
Whatever you do, do not dis the Muse, or sneer at the gateway or, as I did (with one short story sold and two novels out collecting rejections), brag that you have your writing completely under your conscious control and my subconscious little or nothing to do with it.
Call it a Muse, or your subconscious . . . Mine was pissed.
It was interesting. I wrote madly for months, before the Muse relented, leaving me with a wild pile of writing that I then had to consciously tear apart, add to, and edit for the second through fifth novels of the Wine of the Gods series. Then write the first book . . .
So I have admitted both publicly and internally, that my subconscious is the actual boss, and in charge of writing. The conscious mind is in charge of interesting inspirations, research, editing, and publishing . . . now if I just had a part of my mind that wanted to market . . .
I get the ideas. Often they sit around and insist that I am responsible for fitting them in a structure.
Later it is impossible to determine what was inspiration from the Muses and what was painful drudgery
My muse…I will admit, it’s not as bad as John Ringo’s (who requires low temperatures and apparently likes to torture him during the process of writing), but I know that my desire to create stories is how I escape being bored, frustrated, annoyed, and/or angry with the world.
Trying to be in the contradictory mindset that lets me share those stories with people is one of the most tiring things I can do. Frustrating.
But occasionally amazing when I can do it for long periods of time.
I had a perfectly good story idea when the fog this morning kicked my muse into a really odd direction. Again. I have found that saying “I’m ending this series” tends to push the muse into attack mode.
I’ve almost given up on trying to control my muse. I just brace for the impact, because strange things bubble up from … wherever stories start.
I think it was Tolkien that talked about the “Cauldron Of Story” where all stories written or told go to when they’re written/told.
And story-tellers often take stories from the Caudron to create new stories.
I suppose some story-tellers “get too close” to the Caudron and “stories bubble out from the Cauldron to enter the minds of the story-tellers”. 😀
You definitely know I understand. :laughing merrily:
Yeah. And those early stories? They catch you deep.
Sorry for the off-topic comment, but have any of y’all gotten an email from Amazon about a Beta for ‘Virtual Voice’ audiobooks? After looking at the information that they provide, it looks like they are offering free narration done by an ‘AI’.
It sounds like a good way to expand my market, but I’m not sure yet.
m c a hogharth is pleased with it. pardon no capitals. kitten pinning down my arm
Thank you Sarah.
Is the kitten channeling e.e. cummings? 🙂
No. She was pinning my arm, so I could only type with my left index finger. In those circumstances, typing capitals is a right pain and not worth it.
Oh. For a second there I was wondering if it should be Sarah archy Hoyt. 😉
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_and_Mehitabel
I got an e-mail but have not looked into the service in detail.
I occasionally have very immersive story dreams. I’m never present as myself in these dreams and it’s usually an exotic setting with a few characters and scenes instead of an entire story. I don’t know if that counts for what you are talking about though.
yes
I’ve had those. I’ll generally write enough things down about them to remind me later. Actually got a complete story out of one, written, cleaned up, and sold.
Also note that I remember a lot of my dreams, which I think means I’m not sleeping very well. 😉
“The way it’s natural for me to work is for the story to come to me. Now, sometimes it’s the full story. I start “hearing” it far off, like I need to tune to it better. Like I’m some kind of ill-tune radio. And sometimes I take three or four starts, before I can make the book sound clear. But once it’s clear? Then I run with it. I just have to type as fast as it’s dictated.
Those are amazing. Because it’s like having a vivid dream.”
As a creative type, you are not alone in this. Musician and guitarist extraordinaire Joe Walsh described a very similar process in his song “On the radio”:
I like to sit in a silent place
When no one’s around
And listen inside it
Inside the silence is a melody
Voices singing harmony
I close my eyes and listen carefully
…
Inside the silence is a symphony
Every note there is in every key
The music tells me how it wants to be
I help it write itself down
I hear the way that would sound
It’s like your favorite station
Playing your favorite song
Just like they do on the radio”
I’ve experienced it too, as an engineer. Sometimes a circuit or mechanism just comes to me whole and complete, and I can see it visually, in my mind. Sometimes, I have to get into a silent place, like in the woods, and take my focus off the problem, and let my subconscious mind pour its torrents of thought, some of which will eddy into my conscious mind and give me hints, and additional time/focus is needed to “tune in.” I don’t have complete control over my process, either.
BTW, love your books.
My characters got out of control, writing their own stories, and I got spooked…
I just need to go back and see what they want to do next.
The stories were going well until I realized I wasn’t consciously driving the events.
Since then, I’ve been told that’s OK…
It’s still hard to go back
Yeah. It’s perfectly normal.