You people is all crazy and shit. At least, you writing-out-of-order people.

Not that I'm not, you understand.

I have to write chronologically, because once I know the ending my interest begins to wane. The last couple of chapters of a novel or the last few pages of a short story are always a struggle, because mentally I've moved on to other things. I've tried skipping a difficult scene to write the next one, but it doesn't work for me. I have to slog through and find out what's keeping me from writing that scene in order to keep going.

I think this is because the story always mutates into something else by the time it is all written, and any scene might inform that. Every scene I'm writing leads into the next scene, and if I go into it not knowing the subtleties of what happened in the previous one it doesn't feel right. Not that I'm always subtle, but I want to leave myself that room.

Um, I think I might need clarify something: I don't have a hard and fast rule, "I Must Write In Order", or anything. It's just the way my creativity works. I did it with music, as well; I never wrote a part of a lyric, then diddled with a part of a chord progression, then went back. It was lyric entire/chord structure entire or vice versa, although sometimes I'd add a bit of structural stuff to the guitar line.

That's why I think collaborating might be a good idea for me, with someone who works the other way. There are one or two unfinished novels that I think are unfinished because they need the "further on up the road" look, and I simply can't provide that.

Bev, end of week is fine, ta. I still have to finish the checkover of Weaver and write the cover letter and get it off to St. Martins, and that takes precedence, because the deadline is next Thursday.

The thing is, process is magic. If it works, it works. Somebody else's process won't necessarily work for you. One of the worst things people who are teaching writing or talking about it do, IMHO, is to insist that their process is the only one that can possibly work.

So... for me, writing scenes that come to me is the easy part. The hard part is finding the threads to link them together.

Hm. I hope no one thought I was trying to say I worked "The Right Way." I work the right way for me, and I was just teasing about the being crazy.

Sigh. Guess it's time to start using emoticons again.

No, I didn't think that at all, David, nor did I mean to imply it.

Not me, Knut; I actually wrote mine before I saw your post. I just was thinking out loud.

back to cookery for tonight. Betsy gets risotto!

OK, good.

Erm. Sent off some short stories today and yesterday. Also putting together an agent query, which is no fun.

What I've enjoyed about this discussion is how clearly it shows there is no One True Way. Over the years, I've read so many books on writing, and for the most part they were helpful--show-don't-tell, how to handle dialogue gracefully, where to start your story, how to structure a scene, etc. Mechanics. A lot of which I knew instinctively from years of reading, but the writing books definitely helped me apply the techniques.

However, most of the books really pushed a structured approach--outlines, extensive character bios, writing in order, etc. And when I try that, I either bog down in outlining and biographying and never get to the story, or I only get as far as to the first place I get writer's block, and then I abandon it altogether. So for a long while I thought I didn't have what it takes to be a writer. But then I read Diana Gabaldon's Outlandish Companion, where she discusses, among other things, her approach to writing. Very unstructured, researches as she goes along, making notes in her manuscript when she needs to look something up but not letting it bog her down, writes out of order, etc. And I thought, "That sounds like a way I could write." So the next time I had an idea, I started writing it that way, and here I am.

Oh! Research!

I write things set in a profession or an era that interests me, so research is fun! Sometimes so much fun that I forget there's a purpose for my research, that I'm supposed to stop researching at some point, and actually, you know, write.

And then, having done all that research, and brimming over with wonderful knowledge about the profession, or era, or geographic location, or anthropologic information, I naturally want to share this knowledge. And the setting or background becomes foreground, and the novel starts becoming a textbook. Not good. But research, for me, is great fun.

Oh, I love research too! The reason I do it as I'm writing instead of first research, then write, is that if I did all the research at the beginning, that's all I'd ever do. I'd turn into a library hermit.