Finding Your Writing Process

ACFWAuthors and writing, Friends of ACFW, writing Leave a Comment

By Carol Buchanan, PhD

Sometimes the most difficult task in the writing life is to find your own writing process. By writing process, I don’t mean answering one of these questions:

Are you a plotter?

Are you a pantser?

Are you somewhere on the continuum between them?

Even if you’re the most determined plotter, who devises every twist and turn of the story, puts your protagonist through life-or-death ordeals that lead to cliff-edge battles over a raging river or thundering waterfalls, at some point you realize your protagonist is female – and oh, by the way, she has three small children whose kidnapper she’s fighting like Mama Bear to rescue them from…

I’m sure you get the idea, which is, in brief: Even when you stick to the most detailed outlines and scene plans, writing the book can surprise you.

Then, as writing guru Larry Brooks told me during a writer’s conference last year, “It’s an iterative process.” We work back and forth between the book and the outline. And writing the book will change the outline, no matter how rigorously we stick to our beat sheets (a device brought from film to the printed novel or short story).

Months after that conference, when I had finished the first ninety-five pages of my newest novel and fifth novel, I hit a snag. (That’s a saying from the old river steamboat days, when huge trees were uprooted by a river changing its course and floated until they became so waterlogged that they sank to the bottom to lie in wait for unwary steamboats. They were said to “snag” the boat. Think Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemens.)

My best beta reader read those pages and when she brought them back to me she asked, “What’s the heart of the story?”

I could tell her, and did, in one coherent sentence.

But if she could read that many pages and not know what the book is about, I had failed with it before it was finished.

Better to find out now than at page 350, I thought. Or when readers gave it a slew of one-star reviews on Amazon.

I had to find out what was wrong and why. Having already read several books on story, and taught a class on story structure, I’m familiar with the Christopher Vogler’s Writer’s Journey, the Aristotelian three-act structure, the Freytag Pyramid, Mr. Brooks’s Story Engineering, and Robert McKee’s Story.

Rather than reread all that and more, I’ve gone to the source.

The novel.

I’m now reading novels by Davis Bunn. Of all the authors I’ve read in my career as a voracious fiction reader (a PhD in English and History), I chose his novels to read with the objective of learning how he stays at the top of this tricky profession and consistently produces novels I and millions of other people love to read.

As we say here in Montana, This ain’t my first rodeo.

Because, in 2018 I tripped on an invisible rise in a sidewalk. I proved that the face and front teeth are no match for concrete, an experiment I don’t intend to repeat. I knocked myself out, and got a “mild concussion,” the docs said. If that was mild, I shudder to think what moderate might be, let alone severe.

So it seems I have more to relearn, besides balance, than I thought.

My next, and final, post for ACFW on June 14 will describe what I’ve learned from a master of the novel: Davis Bunn.

When in doubt about how to structure a novel, study the masters of story craft. Who would that be? Read the blog to find out. 😊 @CarolBuchananMT #ACFWBlogs #writetip #critiques #ACFWCommunity Click To Tweet

Carol Buchanan, PhD, writes historical Westerns set in the Montana gold rush when ruffians ruled and murder was tolerated. Awarded Spur and Spur Finalist from the Western Writers of America, and the “Spirit of Dorothy Johnson” from the Whitefish Library Association, she teaches “Becoming Montana,” a class in early Montana history at Flathead Valley Community College. She is married to Sir Richard, her “tech support.” Her website is https://carol-buchanan.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *