My Process

I've enjoyed reading what Kaela has written recently describing her artistic process with Saturday Art, so, in honor of my friends doing NaNoWriMo, I'm going to take a stab at describing my own creative process.

To begin with, my process is sloppy and involves a lot of procrastination. The days that Ben is at day care go something like this:

8 AM--Wave bye-bye to Ben and Tom. Check email. Read paper and justify it as "gathering material."
9 AM--Surf the internet. Blog and read other people's blogs.
9:30-11:30--Work on freelance projects.
11:30-12:00--Use exercise bike, reading something writing-related or freelance-related.
12:30--Lunch.
1:00--More freelance work, or write in journal about what a loser I am and how I never get anything done.
2:00--Freewrite about how I have no ideas. Check email frequently. Bemoan my lack of blog comments.
2:55--Worry about Christmas list.
3:00--Make coffee or do housework to rouse myself from the afternoon slump.
3:15--Force myself to work on fiction.
3:20--Surf the internet.
3:30--Force myself to work on fiction.
3:45--Finally get into the swing of things and come up with a good idea.
4:45--Leave to pick up Ben.

I've found that no matter how much time I have, I still procrastinate. I keep meaning to start my day working on fiction, but I'm never able to. I have to feel somewhat cornered in order to write.

I have a lot of respect for the people who are doing NaNoWriMo and trying to write 50,000 words by the end of the month, but I know I couldn't do it. My ideas take a long time to unfold, and sometimes I have to let things sit for a while. Take the last novel I wrote, the one I'm trying to find an agent for now. I was 45 pages into a Young Adult novel I was having trouble with; I had characters I liked, but I couldn't figure out the plot. So I started freewriting about plots in general, and I thought about how Aristotle says that Oedipus has a model plot for a tragedy. That gave me an idea for a new project, and I abandoned the YA novel without looking back.

With what I'm working on now, I have two characters: a woman (taken from a story my former boss told me about her mom) who is walking down the street during the fall, and a man. I wrote about the woman a year and a half ago, and then I let those two pages sit. Later, I added a few pages about the man. This summer, I went back to those sketches. I knew the man and the woman would meet, but how? I started writing about a former coworker of mine who had died in a tragic accident. Suddenly, I realized how the accident would bring the man and woman together.

My husband has told me I follow a "gestational model" of fiction, and that may be true. I'm willing to wait for my stories to become viable. Sometimes stories come to me in scenes, and I don't know how the scenes will fit together until much later. I tend to write in a circular rather than a linear fashion, sketching out scenes and then going back to them later to fill in the details. For that reason, I could never, as many NaNoWriMo participants are doing, share my work day by day; most of what I've written in a particular day makes no sense until I go back and revise it, connecting it to the whole.

I hestitate to even call what I'm working on now a novel, for fear that it won't make it past the 35-page mark. I'm doing my best to trust in my process--my imperfect, erratic process--and see where it takes me.


* * *

In other novel news, according to this article, copies of The Apprentice: A Novel by recently-indicted Lewis "Scooter" Libby are selling well on amazon.com.