Writing is like a cookie…
Stupid spring - they’re calling for an inch of snow here today.
Anyway, today I want to talk breifly about writing processes. I know everyone has their own process and in the immortal words of Susan Elizabeth Phillips that process is to be protected to the death (okay, so I’m paraphrasing).
But, I still want to talk about it. Mostly because of Tess.
She’s doing this 30 drafts in 30 days thing where she goes through and looks at scenes individually and, I dunno, magically whips them into shape or something (obviously I don’t really get it ’cause it’s not my process).
But here’s the thing, it obviously helps her, it’s making her unblocked, but the thought of looking at my book and picking it apart by scenes absolutely terrifies me!
I’ll admit this once and never again - I don’t even know if I could separate my books into scenes. I look at a book as a whole. Please don’t think I’m picking on anyone’s process ’cause I’m not, if anything I’m impressed by people that can do this ’cause I can’t.
To me, picking apart the scenes in a book is like picking the chocolate chips out of a chocolate chip cookie (or perhaps eating the white stuff out of the center of the oreo first). The food all ends up in the same place, but I prefer my to eat the chocolate chips with the rest of the cookie, and dunk the whole oreo in milk, not just the chocolate parts.
*sigh* Only someone on a diet can compare writing to cookies.
So tell me about your process, and what kinds of things do you see others doing that you don’t understand?
March 21st, 2006 at 1:41 pm
LOL, Emma! It does sound strange when you compare what I’m doing to picking out the chocolate chips in a cookie. But what this does for me is helps me see that I have everything I need there and there’s no blanks or gaps or loss ends hanging down dragging the story. When I’m writing I can’t do it pieces or in disjointed scenes. I have to write from beginning to end. And that’s part of my problem with this blockage. I took those scenes and started breaking them up and shifting them around in the story and it no longer played out in my mind. But after the story is written what i’m doing now is a huge help for me to make sure I’m all good. I’m just having to do this process early and it’s actually working for me. YAY. . . Did that make any sense at all?
But I just thought of something . . . in my blog post today I broke a movie down by the sex in it and evaluated it. This breaking things down is rubbing off on me I think.
March 21st, 2006 at 3:06 pm
Emma ‘laughing here’ is thinking about those yummy cookies! :-) I have definitely found that I break my book up into parts. Not scenes exactly… partly but mostly by chapters. Most of my scenes are longer then a chapter. Soooo its to overwhelming for me to consider a whole scene. Well, not all the time, some are short and sweet but… I’m long winded :-) as if you haven’t noticed in the past. And as such my characters have a lot to say. :-) Like you said, we all have our own way of doing it, the main thing is that we find it. :-) Have fun dreaming of those cookies! For some reason I’m really really hungry for oreos now. Ummm, and we don’t have any on hand right now. All of a sudden, I think when Carter wakes up we need to run to the store. :-)
Cole
March 21st, 2006 at 5:52 pm
I’m going to take my cookie analogy a little further now…
If you’re trying to figure out how to make a cookie, it makes sense to look at it disjointedly. You would pick out the chocolate chip, and maybe the oatmeal if they’re oatmeal chocolate chip (I’m making my tummy growl).
And it makes sense to me to break up your story and look at it in smaller pieces. BUT, when I do it, it doesn’t make sense to me. I think most of it is intimidation, that it scares me to look too closely because I’m afraid that what should be there, won’t.
March 21st, 2006 at 9:24 pm
PLOTTING the emotional connection out of the book. Picking it to death.
March 21st, 2006 at 9:41 pm
Maybe this is why I don’t make good scratch cookies. I can’t do the breaking apart thing either. And it’s sort of nice to hear I’m not the only one. forever I’ve heard about doing that and I’ve sat by silently thinking there was no way in the world I could. it just seems like they’re all so interwoven. When you seperate it, anything you do effects the mass. Does that make sense? To use Emma’s darling analogy… If I take out the chocolate chops and switched them with peanut butter morsels instead, I have peanut butter cookies, not chocolate chip cookies. And well, that’s too much of a change for me to consider in part instead of whole.
Hmmm… Now I’m off to the kitchen for a snack. Probably not one cookie in the house. grumble…grumble…
March 22nd, 2006 at 4:35 pm
This is a test. This is only a test. Your blog has eaten my last two posts.
Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep