IGM The Writing Process

Inter-Galactic Memo
To: All Personnel
Fr: W. Leavitt
Re: The Writing Process
11-8-2010


There is a writer, I know of—I’m a fan—who writes backwards. He’s a famous one, with awards, and millions of books sold, and even an academy award for a screenplay. But how does he write backwards? He explained it in one of his novels, through a character who is also a writer. He has to have the last sentence, has to hear it and feel it, before he can start. And then he writes backwards, so the first sentence is the last one he writes. And it takes him a long time. Years. He’s only written twelve books in his career. I’ve written more than twice that in the last ten years. And he has this strange habit of writing sentences, or fragments of sentences, and tacking them up on a board where he can see them and think about them. I guess when he has enough sentences he can write a paragraph, and then a chapter—backwards. Once he knows the whole story, and is familiar with the characters, he can start writing, filling in. That’s what he says at least.
It was nice to find out that this technique was an accident; just the way he started doing it and it became a habit, and then a process. At first he thought it was an immature phase, but it turned out to be the way he writes.
I’m pretty insecure about my writing, and it is a little comforting to discover that famous writers sometimes feel that way too, and wonder if their ‘method’ might be off kilter or out of bounds. It doesn’t bother me that this writer is much better than I am. He writes, I write, we both do our best and hopefully get what we are looking for out of the experience.
On the other hand, my ‘method’ is so different from his, and from any other method I’ve read about, that my insecurities come raging forward again, and I worry that I’m missing something, that my writing is hampered or limited by my method, or lack thereof.
The truth is, I don’t have a method that I am aware of, based on any known and accepted process used by professional writers.
I start writing when it feels like the right time to start. Sometimes I’ve had the idea for months or years, and sometimes I’ve had the idea for five minutes. And a few times—two that I remember for sure—I’ve started with no idea in mind at all.
I’ve started several with only a title because I liked the way it sounded and knew something would come if I began writing. Car Dancing and Evil Alien Artifact were both written that way. For Car Dancing, I had the title and a one sentence description of the main character. For Artifact, all I had was the title, which was a throw-away line from That 70’s Show, and a vague idea that I wanted to do a send-up of sci-fi stories. Another book was worse. I started The Seaweed Bar and Grill with no title, no plot, no characters and not a single idea as to what it might be about. That was on purpose; I had just finished reading a book by Thomas Pynchon and took it as a challenge to try and write something blind, because it felt like that’s what he did—even though I knew this wasn’t true. He’s just a genius and can do things like that. So I just put my fingers on the keyboard and started, and things came, and a few pages later the title magically appeared (although I didn’t know it at the time). It’s one of my favorites. I have no idea if it’s any good or not. I was trying to see if it was possible to write with no pre-conceived ideas, and make the story entirely character driven, rather than by plot. I guess it is.
I never plot anyway. I don’t know how. That is the secret of my ‘method.’ I’ve never taken a writing class. I’ve never attended a writers conference, or gone to a writers workshop, or joined a writers group, either real or virtual. As a writer, I have three things going for me. One, I love doing it, and always have. It comes easy. Two, I’ve read thousands of books across a wide range of types, styles, authors, genres and subjects. And three, I have a pretty good imagination. But I don’t know process. I don’t know how to plot a story—I’m not sure I even know what that means. I don’t know how to build a character. And I don’t know how to write backwards. For me, knowing the end of a story, and what will happen in each chapter and in what order, before I start, would ensure that I never start. Why write it if I know how it’s going to end? At some point in the writing, I usually figure it out, but sometimes that doesn’t happen until I’m on the last page. I knew how Car Dancing would end by the time I was half way through, and I spent the last half trying to prevent it, change it, but I couldn’t. Stories and characters are powerful. Inevitable.
In other words, I’m an ignorant writer. Or an innocent one. But good or bad, talented or a hack, I love it. Nothing makes me any happier than sitting there, typing away, caught in a continuing moment of discovery. I start at the beginning and characters show up as I need them, and things happen that surprise me, shock me, make me happy and sad and angry. I’m telling myself a story I haven’t heard before, and that’s my method. I have an audience of one.
Now I’ve written at least thirty books, and can’t stop. I don’t want to stop. I read things writers have said about writing and I don’t get it. For them it is a struggle, a horrible, lonely, excruciating experience. For me it’s just the opposite. I love everything about it, can’t wait to go somewhere everyday and write. I love how every time I sit down, not know what’s going to happen, something comes. And I never get writers block—I just work on something else, or don’t write that day. The only thing I worry about now is this: since my heart attack, I worry about having enough time to get them all out and onto paper. I’m working on it though; unlike my backwards-writing hero, I write pretty fast. Probably because I don’t know what I’m doing.