Searching for a Method to the Madness

I first put pen to paper with the intent of creating a story purely for the fun of it in the late fall of 1990. Until I discovered online writing forums and began with the college newspaper some nine years later, what I knew of writing was gleaned mostly from trial and error. It still is to a large extent, but I do have some idea of what works for others and the craft of it. The one and only college creative writing course I took back in spring 2004 certainly helped, though it was mostly reading and critiquing the work of everyone in the class like a mega sized writer’s group.

Oh sure, I was taught to string together grammatically correct sentences and how to structure an essay in high school the same as everyone else, but writing fiction is a whole different game. How do you bring order and method to a creative process? Should you even try? I’ve been asking myself these questions for years and searching for a way to bring some method to the madness that is my “process,” and I know there isn’t any one size fits all answer.

I’m still searching for a way to refine the manner in which I write to make the process more efficient. The questions for world building list Bob Younce posted in the comments for yesterday’s post are a likely source of inspiration down the road.

Although I’ve yet to find a method to work for me, I have discovered some pros and cons to a litany of techniques and thought perhaps they could be of some use to other writers out there. So today begins a three part series on different writing methods. Like the world building series, this is another topic I’d love to have a good discussion on since while I have had the rare chat regarding world building, I’ve never gotten the chance to discuss writing styles and methods in any detail.

Also, it should be noted I’ve never seen actual names attached to any of these methods, so I’ve given them my own. If you know of a particular thing they’re called, please let me know.

The Naturalistic Method

Perhaps the most natural way to write is to just jump right in and see where the story takes you. I know it’s how most everything I write starts out, at least in the earliest phases, and it works rather well for short pieces. It’s the way all the essays, short stories, poems, and other various works of 10,000 words or less I’ve done were written.

The Naturalistic Method has one big drawback. It lends itself to meandering off onto tangents, dropped story arcs, and highly fragmented stories. When you don’t have any sort of roadmap, it’s all too easy to become enamored of and distracted by one particular element and either wander into a boxed canyon or become entirely lost.

The Mega Outline Method

When I first started venturing onto online writing forums, I heard a lot of talk about outlining before beginning work on a novel. I decided to give it a try.

Have you ever actually tried to outline an entire novel? Let me tell you, if you’ve only ever created an outline for a research paper, the size of it is shocking. You end up with the grandfather of all outlines.

Now, I like having an outline as a guide. It definitely helps keep the story on track and foreshadowing is much easier when you can see what’s ahead at a glance. Plus, if you’re as forgetful as I am, the reminders built into the outline work wonders for not dropping storylines halfway through or leaving plot holes gaping.

However, for those of us with a more organic sense of imagination, the mega outline is rather rigid and limiting. It helps for sure, but it gets annoying rebuilding the thing every time a previously unseen nuance comes along, you decide the ordering is wrong, or something needs to be deleted altogether.

I wasted so much time outlining and re-outlining, I finally just gave up on this method myself.

Here we have two extremes: one totally organic and flowing and the other the picture of order and rigid.

I could keep going, but to keep this post from becoming a behemoth, I’ve decided to split it into several posts. We’ll take a look at a few techniques falling somewhere along the spectrum between in tomorrow’s post.