Friday open thread: your creative process

[dolorosa_12]

I am absolutely flattened by work this week, and next week promises to be more of the same. It's the point in the academic year when all the Master's and PhD students have to hand in literature reviews and project proposals, and all of them suddenly panic and realise that the classes I taught them (carefully timetabled to coincide with the point at which they were meant to start work on their literature reviews and project proposals) actually contained crucial, useful information and they probably should have been paying more attention and doing the suggested follow-up activities while what I taught them was fresh in their minds. Because they haven't done this, they all, of course, contact me at once, now. It's good to be needed — I wouldn't have a job, otherwise — but I wish they didn't all need me so much and all at the same time.

Anyway, let's use another snowflake_challenge prompt for the Friday open thread: Talk about your creative process.

I know a lot of you have already answered this in your own journals, so feel free to link to your posts in the comments rather than writing things out again. Or, answer in the comments if this is a brand new topic for you!


I don't really have a fancy creative process, but — as per yesterday's post — boy am I methodical when I set my mind to creating something. I think it comes from having such a deeply academic and journalistic background that I write best when I have a prompt to both set me off and constrain me: I don't find writing hard at all, but I find it easiest when I have a brief, topic, assignment, etc. In a similar vein to what I was saying in yesterday's post, I basically do not and never have put myself into situations in which I sign up to write anything that I do not know already I'm capable of writing. (And I mean this in the sense of fanfic assignments, assessed university coursework, MPhil dissertation, PhD thesis, book reviews and features interviews when I was a journalist, etc.)

So I go into writing with a pretty clear idea of what I'm planning to write, and, usually, an intended word count (although with fanfic it's more like 'when the story has hit all these beats, it's finished' rather than any set word count), and a deadline (either self- or externally-imposed, although with the externally-imposed deadlines I tend to err on the side of caution; I finished my Honours thesis a month before it was due and my MPhil dissertation a week before it was due, for example). Then I set goals (for longer pieces of academic work, it was always 1000 words per day, for journalistic articles it was always 'minimum of 1 complete article per writing session,' although there were points when I wrote 3 or 4 articles in a day, for fanfic it tends to be '500 words or at least two of the planned beats of the story, whichever happens last, per writing session), and write the thing until it's done. I always stopped when whatever goal is hit, even if it's taken me only an hour or so — I'm a big believer in breaking things into manageable chunks. When the thing is done, editing happens, again with similar quantifiable goals-per-editing-session imposed in advance.

All of this is very prosaic and methodical — I guess it's not exactly what you'd think of when you think of 'creative process,' which always sounds to me like it involves setting a perfect atmosphere and getting yourself into a certain mental state and candles and playlists and research and so on — but honestly, I've done it all my life, and I can't imagine putting words on the page in any other way. You'll notice that the process is the same, whether I'm writing fiction or nonfiction, and maybe the idea of treating fanfic as equivalent to a university essay rankles, but again, this method has served me very well, so why mess with something that works?

The only other thing I'd say is that in the rare instances in which I struggle to put words to page/screen, I've always found that moving into a different physical location, or switching to writing longhand with pen and paper unblocks things almost instantly.





What about you?

Comments

[yarnofariadne]

I was always the same as you with academic work. I almost always finished papers a minimum of several days before, but often weeks before they were due.

Here's mine! I mostly talked about environmental stuff while doing creative work.

[dolorosa_12]

It really makes things so much less stressful, and after a certain point, there are no improvements that can reasonably be made, so I never saw any need to keep writing and editing an assignment right up to the due date. The other thing I used to do — when possible — was volunteer as early in the semester as possible to do my tutorial presentations. Most of the subjects I studied had three major pieces of assessment: a longish essay (always due near the end of the semester), an exam (always in the final two weeks of the semester after teaching was over), and a tutorial presentation, which you could choose to do in any week of the teaching period. Most people picked later slots so they had more time to prepare, but I always tried to do it in the second or third week, so that I didn't need to be writing the presentation, writing the essay, and studying for the exam all at the same time. I never understood why others didn't realise this was the most efficient way to do things!

I'll comment on your response over at your own journal, but thanks for sharing it here as well!

[nerakrose]

maybe the idea of treating fanfic as equivalent to a university essay rankles

maybe it does, to some, but not to me - I think it makes perfect sense. I'm a better fiction writer for having done academic writing and vice versa. the texts couldn't be any more different, but they still have similar constraints - beats that need to be hit, or structural qualities that are essential. you make similar choices wrt word choices and sentence structures. and personally I feel that being a fiction writer helps keep academic writing flowing and interesting. I know some disciplines have ideas about specific, dry, academic language (and I'm sure in some disciplines it's required for clarity reasons) but I feel like we can and should make our academic texts easy to read. I have a whole rant about gatekeeping that touches on this. anyway, when it comes to writing both these types of texts - on a very basic level, both an academic essay/paper/dissertation and a fanfic need to have a beginning, middle, and end. why not plan accordingly ? :)

[dolorosa_12]

I agree entirely — the best way to become a better writer (of any type of writing) is to read a lot, and write a lot in an environment in which your writing is going to be subject to detailed feedback and editing. I was a newspaper book-reviewer from the ages of 16-27 or so, and this obviously coincided with much of the most intensive academic writing period of my life (final years of secondary school, undergrad, and MPhil degree, plus the first years of my PhD), and I think it was the best education in writing anyone could possibly have. Unless I wrote, I wasn't going to get paid, and it really sharpened both my analytical skills, and my ability to adapt written communication to different contexts (although I remember my Honours thesis supervisor in undergrad complaining to me that I 'wrote like a journalist,' which she did not mean as a compliment).

I know some disciplines have ideas about specific, dry, academic language (and I'm sure in some disciplines it's required for clarity reasons) but I feel like we can and should make our academic texts easy to read.

I feel that subject-specific terminology is necessary in a lot of cases, but apart from that I feel that academic language should strive for flow and clarity, just the same as in any other written context (French literary theorists and their imitators: the bane of my existence when I was a student). I teach academic writing in my job (mainly to scientific researchers), and I think my students would find writing a lot easier if the kinds of articles they were trying to produce were written in a less artificial way.

on a very basic level, both an academic essay/paper/dissertation and a fanfic need to have a beginning, middle, and end. why not plan accordingly ? :)

Yes indeed!

[dhampyresa]

similar quantifiable goals-per-editing-session

How do you create said goals?

[dolorosa_12]

Again, it depends on the length of the piece of writing and when it is due — when it was stuff like my PhD thesis, I'd get chapters back from my supervisor with her comments and the goal would be to edit ten pages per day. I don't think I could explain it in a way that is replicable, because it's all based on bizarre internal mental arithmetic taking into account how easy I found it to write the thing, the complexity of the editing involved, the time available before the thing is due, how many other competing time-sensitive tasks I have to complete, and just — based on decades of experience treating all forms of writing in this manner — having a really good sense of how much time I'm likely going to need to devote to the thing before it's finished. As I was saying to goodbyebird below, I've never liked to spend more than two hours per day on a single activity, so this method of creating and completing pieces of writing was in a sense developed so that I would never have to, but would always finish things in an efficient manner with little stress.

[merit]

Hindsight... I guess it is predictable for you to a certain extent so you know what to look forward to each January.

[dolorosa_12]

Yes indeed. October-November, and mid-January to February are the absolute busiest times of year for me, with another brief flurry in June when the final versions of MPhil dissertations are due and the students suddenly start panicking about referencing. It's like clockwork, so at least I can brace for it, and know exactly when things will calm down again.

[goodbyebird]

for fanfic it tends to be '500 words or at least two of the planned beats of the story, whichever happens last, per writing session), and write the thing until it's done. I always stopped when whatever goal is hit, even if it's taken me only an hour or so

That honestly sounds like such a good way to approach it.

[dolorosa_12]

I think some people get in a kind of hyperfocused writing zone, in which they can just write and write and write in a flow state — it would suit people like that better to keep writing until they leave this state of being. I've never experienced such a thing (only when swimming, dancing or running), and in general I don't like to spend more than two hours at a time on a single activity, so the approach that I've figured out really works well in terms of keeping me focused, and getting the thing done.

[thawrecka]

My process differs depending on whether it's fiction or non-fiction, and if it's fiction on the length.

With all my uni essays (and I've carried this forward to any non-fiction pieces I try to write since), I would look at the word count and figure out what was 10% over that or 10% under that to see what my min or max word counts could be. I'd remove from that 10% for the introduction and 5% for the conclusion, and write those last. I'd figure out how many different points I would have to make to answer the question, and separate those into sections; with each section I'd figure out the allowable world count and basically do standard five+ sentence paragraph structure to fill that out. Then write the intro, then conclusion, then assemble it all together and read over a few times for flow and editing things in to shape.

This is such a methodical process and it explains why I was able to write everything very last minute for much of university while only slightly feeling like I was dying inside 😂 And it's easier to create a piece from my assembled notes on what I think on a topic that way. A lot of my friends are the opposite type who would just start writing a free flowing essay and then have to edit it down, and that honestly always sounded like a lot more work.

When it comes to fiction, it very much depends on the length. I'm neither at the extreme outliner end, nor at the extreme no-outline end of the scale, so if it's 5k words or longer I need a flexible outline I'm allowed to change that also allows me to discover part of the story along the way. If it's shorter I sort of keep the idea in my head. I generally like music on when I write to block out the road sounds (I live on an arterial road) so I don't get distracted, and I often try to pick music that fits the vibe of whatever scene I'm currently trying to write. I also like to get up and move around every so often, so I don't feel too stuck on a sentence, and I let myself write out of order if that's what needs to happen to make things go forward.

A lot happens in the edit, tbh. I'm a classic underwriter and often need to add a lot later to expand so I'm not relying too much on context and subtext that the reader could find confusing. I basically finish writing when editing the same thing over and over gets too tiresome and I declare it done.

[dolorosa_12]

That is such a methodical process for the nonfiction writing, and I can see why it's served you so well! I always used to do something similar (mainly in terms of splitting the word count up into segments so that I knew how many words I'd have to write in each of my planned components part, and also writing the introduction and conclusion last), although I never met a word count that I didn't happily sail over in excess — all my uni assignments were at least 10 per cent over (my Honours thesis was meant to be 15,000 words and it was more like 18,000), but the fact that this was back in the days when everything was submitted as a printed copy and not digitally meant that I could essentially lie about the word count and no one ever called me on it. I blame my mother telling me at an influential age that all written communication should be written as if one is explaining the concept to an idiot who knows nothing about the subject: it saddled me with a lifelong habit of overexplaining everything in written work.

Your fiction writing process sounds similarly pragmatic, flexible, and sensible.