Following your rules

Writ­ers approach the sto­ries they write in many ways. Some make detailed out­lines. Char­ac­ter stud­ies. Plot every­thing from A to Z. In quite anoth­er fash­ion, oth­ers impro­vise as they go. There are times I work out plot details ahead of time. But I don’t do that very often. I tend to be of the impro­vis­ing nature, telling myself I want some kind of organ­ic devel­op­ment. I want to get to the rewrit­ing stage as fast as I can.

I am not here to sug­gest what the bet­ter way is. I can say that when I impro­vise I tend to over­write. It’s as if—to offer a gar­den­ing metaphor—I sim­ply cast my seeds over the ground, rather than plant­i­ng those seeds in a straight line. But then—to extend the metaphor—I spend a lot of time weeding.

Years ago I had a con­ver­sa­tion with an estab­lished writer—at the time very much old­er than I—who told me, “The more you think about what you are going to write—the less time you will need to write it.”

That said, some­times think­ing about what you are going to write is an excuse for not writing.

Those who fol­low these notes know I don’t believe in fol­low­ing rules. That is, oth­er people’s rules. I do believe that every writer needs to dis­cov­er their own most pro­duc­tive way of work­ing. The key word is pro­duc­tive. If you are not pro­duc­tive, you don’t have the right rules.

And if you have rules, and they are not work­ing, you need to find bet­ter ones.