Calculated Spontaneity

We are all familiar with the two styles of writing: Outlining and discovery writing.  Outlining is really any organized manner of plotting and writing a story.  Discovery, on the other hand, is simply writing at its most visceral and creative.  These are polar opposites, as are the writers who promote them.

Writers rarely fall under one or the other category, however.  It is less outlining vs. discovery and more outlining-discovery.  A sort of continuum, as Brandon Sanderson puts it.  Each writer fits somewhere up and down that scale.  Some part outlining, some part discovery.  It is the rare writer who is a purist.  Most of us are hybrids.

Oddly though, the ways of mixing discovery and outlining are not discussed very often.  So, how does a writer blend these polar opposites?  How does a writer dynamically switch from one mode to the other?

A purist outliner will quite nearly detail every last nod and sigh.  With footnotes.  But we’re going to take a step back from that.  Create a scene-by-scene breakdown.  Answer things like: Where is the scene?  Who is in the scene?  What are the scene’s aimpoints or goals, if any?  Purists would go much, much farther.  But we’re going to stop right here.  That’s it.  Write the scene.  Keep your aimpoints in mind.  Keep your plot and character details in mind.  If you've done research, keep those facts in check.  Then just write the scene.  Let it flow naturally.  Visualize it and write it.  If you are visualizing faster than you can write, do not pause.  If you get hung up on a piece of the scene, push past it.  Leave a little note in brackets to remind you of the part left unfinished.  Keep going.

Once you reach the end of the scene, check how you did.  Did you meet your aimpoints or goals?  Did you keep your facts in check?  Did the scene “progress” in the right direction?  As the saying goes, the joy is in the journey.  How you achieve a scene’s objectives is more important than the objectives themselves.  This journey is the part you can discovery write.

Discovery writers might be feeling a serious buzz kill, right now.  But you don't have to do scene-by-scene.  Simply create the over-arching aimpoints for the entire story.  Where do your characters start?  Where do your characters end?  What was their journey?  Where does it take place?  What is the conflict?  What is the resolution?  How did it affect your characters?  Then let loose.  You are free to dream.  Unleash all your creativity upon the story, unrestrained and unbound.  Yet, directed.  Occasionally, stop and examine your work.  Make sure you are on track.  See that your story is aimed properly.  Don't focus on any particular scene.  The general direction of the story is what's important.

It is all about visualizing the story.  If you need more structure to visualize, do more outlining, research and character detailing.  If these get in your way, junk them.  Some of us need preparation and guidance.  Some of us only need a blank page and a dream.

Let's talk about dreams next time in: Dreaming of Elsewhere

Why Spell Check Is Your Best Friend

If you are a writer and you are anything like me, you read a lot of writing blogs.  You find yourself listening to writing podcasts.  You might even read some books on the subject.  I hope so.  Otherwise writing this blog will be a colossal waste of time.  Although seeking writing advice can become a bit obsessive-compulsive and pull you away from actual writing, it can be very helpful.

Every once and a while, though, you come across advice that is as widespread as it is so very, very wrong.

This is the case with spell check.  Expert after expert repeat the same thing: Turn off spell check in your word processor.  They argue that it takes you out of your creative flow, often with erroneous corrections.  They laugh at the spell check's inability to understand the common vernacular and dialogue rhythms.  Spell check, they say, should only be used when your book is completed.

Let me explain why these arguments are only partly right but mostly wrong.

Our brains are exquisitely capable of understanding speech.  There are whole sections of our brains devoted to nothing but understanding speech, with all its patterns and vagaries.  As writers, our job is to distill the creative "speech" within our minds into words that will "speak" to a reader.  It is a remarkable transference of thoughts and ideas from the author's mind to that of the reader, all through a completely passive medium.

However, the process a writer goes through to distill their creative "speech" can be painful.  It requires a lot of input.  Now, of course, much of this comes from family, friends, agents, alpha/beta readers and editors.  But, most importantly, this input comes from writers' personal scrutiny of their work.  Reading and rereading the manuscript.  Determining what needs to be changed and what needs to be added.

This is where the omnipresent spell and grammar check comes in.*  At every stage of the writing process, it can provide crucial input and feedback.  Whether or not it is valuable to you as a writer depends on you.  You have to understand its purpose.  You have to understand your writing style, your "voice" and how this affects the spell check.  It is imperfect.  It does make glaring mistakes.  But it does provide critical analysis in real-time.  Once you realize this, you can begin treating spell check like you should treat all feedback.  When someone reads your work, do you accept all their suggestions and criticisms?  No, of course not.  Why?  Because easily two-thirds of the time they are wrong.  Yet, their input is invaluable.  In my experience, spell and grammar check is wrong maybe half the time.  Like reader feedback, its input is also invaluable.

Often, when an entire sentence is underlined with the squigglies, I pause.  I don't immediately change everything.  But I do reconsider the sentence with a more critical eye.  This has helped me immeasurably.  Sometimes there is a kernel of truth in what is fritzing out the spell and grammar check.  Some vital thing is missing.  Then again maybe it is just fine.  You have to be able to determine this on your own.

Getting wrong feedback or false negatives, as I like to call them, is part of the process of perfecting your manuscript.  Whether from a person or from spell and grammar check.  You have to know what you believe, what you want and what you have achieved.  Holding your ground against wrong feedback is as vitally important as properly responding to correct feedback.  Only you can tell your story.

In the next post, I'll be exploring a largely ignored rule of writing in: One Rule To...Rule Them All?

*   For the sake of this blog, I am going to assume everyone is using Microsoft Word.  If you are not, your experience may vary.