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I agree with so many things Donald Maass has said in his comemnt. And, I am sorry to say, I disagree with both of you that coming up with the storyline is not the hardest part. To address Donald's comemnt first because I believe it is *the most important* for a writer, no matter what method you use to generate a narrative: Having faith in oneself to tell a story, together with faith in the story itself, is paramount. Without these two things in place, nothing new will come into existence. I learned this from listening to J.K. Rowling in summer of 2011 when I was too ill to read or write. It turned my writing world around by one hundred and eighty degrees. I stopped looking outside myself for approval and began to find the one true story I could believe in, the one I had always wanted to read, the one I would stake my life on, as a writer. Self-belief is also what steers me back to the *truth of the story* when self-doubt arises. (Trust does not eliminate the arising of self-doubt, it makes it irrelevant to the creative process. And therein lies the source of true happiness regardless of the vicissitudes of life or the difficulty of the writing process. Hence, one doesn't need to plug away. One needs to trust the creative process already within, and let go of everything else.)As for: coming up with the storyline is not the hardest thing it depends on what you mean by storyline or outline. Or even plot. I am very much aware that I am in the minority in the way I think and work, although I appear to be in the good company of Arthur C. Clarke and other writers whose subconscious generates the narrative. (Jonathan Franzen is another writer who thinks about his story for several years before committing a single word of the narrative to paper. But once he knows it, he writes very quickly. This is my experience, also.) Deep story logic not something you find by plugging away at writing. You find it by thinking and searching and looking in places you can't imagine beforehand. Meg Rosoff said recently in a blogpost titled, “How to Write,†writing is twenty percent or less of the actual process of creating a story. I’m in that camp, as well. (I believe the twenty percent refers to the narrative; not the preliminary work to find it.) I have over 400 pages notes—many wrong turns that eventually led to rock solid logic—that have generated a storyline I could never have figured out with my conscious mind or through attempting to write the narrative a million times in draft form. I love this story and its characters precisely because everything that came from my conscious mind has eventually been eschewed; as the true story revealed itself according to the degree of love and faith I was willing to give my subconscious. Arguably, my 400 pages and counting are in fact multiple drafts I’ve been plugging away at for over a year. But I do not confuse this kind of preliminary work with an actual draft. I know it for what it is: food for my subconscious to generative the narrative when it believes I'm ready to tell the best story I can.Like? 1
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(VISITOR) AUTHOR'S NAME
Gonzalo
MESSAGE TIMESTAMP
16 december 2014, 09:53:51
AUTHOR'S IP LOGGED
212.101.22.105
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