Fieldnote #2: On The Writing Process

I want to take a step back from my first foray into the field of fiction writing and adjust my fictional glasses. I recall that Philip Pullman once responded on a podcast I vaguely remember; “Don’t plan. If you plan, you’ll end up having a plan for your plan and so on and it’ll end up stilted, so just write. Once you see what you have you can organise your thoughts.” Well Mr Pullman, what if having a plan for my plan and no actuality was my plan all along? *taps forehead* In all seriousness, although these words strike me wise, and everyone has their methods, I thought some commentary on my process could prove insightful.

In reading Pullman and other literary greats, I was struck by the structural mastery at play and dagger-in-a-map plotting that was entirely inconspicuous and held everything together. A kind of hyper-intuitive memory web, spinning narratives that can go in any direction or tangent and still round out seamlessly with the tapestry of the story. If Pullman was able to sling his imagination onto paper in one go like ink flicked on the wall, then either his post-creative phase was out of this world or he possesses incredible natural talent; the latter I don’t doubt either way.

For me, it's helpful to characterise writing styles by way of pattern, like melody in music. One key difference in writing is that the volume of work is usually substantial enough to allow subsets of patterns that can be unpacked, implicated or explicated in greater detail than song. Flow is so essential to music that twists and turns, stops and starts must be largely forgone to maintain a minimum of melody. Further to this analogy, the dichotomy of flow vs structure is a pattern that can be tiled like a fractal, but our minds are uniquely designed to love particular recipes of patterns that are neither completely fractal or completely rhythms.

We tend to shape the trajectories of our lives such that it mirrors a specific degree of excitement vs certainty; order vs chaos. Another way of saying this is that we must spend a certain amount of time bored/reflective to appreciate excitement when it arrives, but we also like it when these timeframes flex and change on a higher-order level, like when we train a facet of our personality to be more consistently “turned on” than it was before. We might say that a sophisticated person is sophisticated because part of their sophistication is their ability to temporarily renounce their sophistication on the spur of a moment (in ways that are not predictably unpredictable). Whereas a simpler creature cannot help but behave automatically, or they are stuck to their sophistication. A complexity that contains simplicity is a greater complexity than complexity alone.

It’s this blending of complexity and simplicity that sets a bar for fascinating writing, and of course one can overdo it; it's more commonly called pretentiousness.

I have always written intuitively. I will start a sentence and pause, either waiting for inspiration or bludgeoning my way through and re-sculpting later. However, as I continue to write the process has become more streamlined. Instead of having to strenuously think through every sentence as I did with the Keystone, sentences land softly in my head as if waiting in the green room behind the curtain, biding their time for an opportune moment. Before I felt I couldn’t trust that I had the resources behind that curtain to make what I wanted to say happen, but that lack of trust was like the overly keen restaurant staff beckoning you in, but deterring you by whiff of desperation. It takes considerable time to be able to relax into an art form.

Nonetheless, all flow and no plan makes Jack a dull writer. At least in my opinion. I am reading a book at the moment where once I dug into 4 or 5 chapters, I could sense that the cadence and theme were not going to change, or at least not change in a way that was not just a variation on a theme. In this case, the book had a refreshing pace, but a brisk factual account with no pause for semantic depth left it disappointingly dry. This ties back to my disagreement with Pullman, even if his writing does not display the errors in question. The skeleton of the book I am writing has been morphing as I step in and out of it in a kind of dance. If I were to write in a single creative flurry, I would be stuck in that mindset, and the purview of the book would be limited by that mindset. By dropping out and contemplating, I’m able to look back with greater objectivity and give myself time to change my mind.

The planning bears fruit when I can translate overarching themes down into the minutia, such that the reader is led along without realising, or only half-noticing that a delightful array of converging forces are bubbling and thickening surreptitiously. By writing only a stream of consciousness, the reader's depth of comprehension is parallel with the author's at the time it was being written. It's all too explicit, and it limits the dimensionality of the work.