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.

[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 ? :)

[dhampyresa]

similar quantifiable goals-per-editing-session

How do you create said goals?