How We Write No. 2

Every year or so (or is it every month?) somebody posts something about the Great War Between Plotters and Pantsers. For my sins I have to confess that until relatively recently (say, last year) I had never heard either of these terms. I know; I’ve led a sheltered life.

This isn’t to say the question of how to approach the writing of a novel hasn’t come up. Even within this blog I've already noted one approach to setting out a story. And on the evidence I’ve been thinking about this subject for a long time.

I recently discovered, in my files, some notes from a conversation I had with Lois McMaster Bujold, concerning her own approach to novel-writing. I have put what follows into past tense because I have no idea whether or not Bujold still writes her Penric stories (set in the world of the Five Gods) in the same fashion. Consider this a snapshot of something that was, then.

The inspirations for her novels, she told me, came from a variety of places. The Vorkosigan novel she was working on at the time, for example, was (she said) inspired by a song from Enya’s album Waterfall and by the story of the martyrdom of forty Roman legionaries*. She said she usually had an idea both of how the novel would begin and how it would end, but not necessarily any detail about the latter.

She wrote her novels in blocks, a block being the chunk of novel about which she was actually aware of what was going to happen. In some ways, this is like working without a net; she told me she usually had next to no idea of what would happen beyond the end of the block she was currently working on.

Within the block, she usually did one- or two-and-a-half drafts. The “half-draft” (I like to think of it as Draft Version 0.5) is how she started: writing longhand, she sketched out scenes as far as she could, working in bits of dialogue if they occurred to her. What she ended up with, I suspect was a sort of schematic of part of the novel.

From this she typed a first full draft (Draft 1.5?) into a word processor† using the schematic as a guide. Subsequent drafts followed the usual pattern of revision, until she decided she had it right. The one thing I’m not sure of (because my notes don’t make clear) is whether the whole novel was completed in the Draft 1.5 stage, or whether she completed each block before moving on.

The important element, I think, is that schematic first draft. When I’ve tried it myself I have been impressed at how smoothly it makes everything flow. Of course, I seem to have tried just about every different approach there is to novel-writing, and will probably try others if I discover any.

*This would be a reference to The Vor Game, the first six chapters of which were first published as "Weatherman," in the February 1990 Analog.
†Remember, this was 1989. Word processors were an exciting thing back then.