Speculation, Fact and Fiction

Over in The Guardian's book blog Hannah Davies wonders "If novels are going to combust imaginatively, shouldn't they be written spontaneously?" going on to say

We now know that noxious fumes are a formidable foe in the battle to produce great literature. Rob Jones, chairman of innovative independent publisher Snowbooks, thinks he's uncovered another enemy: lack of preparation.

I would have thought it was the other way round. Doesn't planning kill creativity? When it comes to fiction, sitting down and hammering out a step-by-step plan just seems so John Grisham, so Jordan's ghostwriter - a writing-by-numbers technique that produces plot-heavy bestsellers. But a little investigation seems to prove Jones right. Stephen King states in On Writing that he never sets out his stories in advance. Orhan Pamuk, by contrast, reveals himself to be a veritable boy scout of literature, saying that he plans his books down to the last detail, to the point of plotting each chapter in advance. So on the side of planning ahead we have a Nobel prizewinner, and fighting the spontaneity corner is a bestseller-list fixture and goremeister.

Read on if you wish. This is another of those evergreen writing debates, so the comment thread is pretty much as you might suspect.

My six pennorth? I'm thinking Rob Jones, innovate independent publisher has probably seen more sprawling messes of hoplessly unstructured prose than most, thanks to the slush pile. Just about every writer I know who's taught creative writing says ability to structure a coherent plot is what divides the may-be's from the never-will's. This is certainly my experience.

Not every time. I've come across those who have nailed a plot down in every particular and gone on to produce astonishingly tedious writing. Mostly because the aforementioned plot is a wholly artificial exercise taking some plot-structure diagram from a 'how to' book and then shoehorning in stuff to tick as many boxes as possible in the genre they think will speed them to fame and fortune. Thus their prose shows the same poverty of inspiration and originality.

The thing is, the successful 'write Chapter One and go!' practitioners are actually just as good as the plan-aheaders at structuring plot. They just do the work at a different point in the process, as they rewrite. Talking to other writers, I find the 'let's go!' folks tend to far more drafts than we plan-aheaders.

(And suffer more from writer's block, incidentally, and tend to have more 'I wrote 60,000 words and realised it was going nowhere' stories. Sorry but I cannot afford to write 60,000 words and realise it's wasted effort!)

I've learned in such conversations that the most successful 'let's go!' writers are almost invariably the most experienced, and will often say, 'I used to do a lot more planning'. While I've heard the most dedicated plan-aheaders say they've become less wedded to their outlines as time passes.

My own experience bears this out. I do a lot of note-taking and advance planning but ten books in, I now see for myself where the internal dynamic of the unfolding plot and character interaction means I must significantly change or even abandon elements of my original scheme. These days I make the necessary adjustments as I'm writing without fretting.

Back in the beginning, I needed an editor to point out where changes were needed to stop the first-draft plot creaking under the strain. After a couple of books, I'd see this for myself but agonise over how best to do it and thrash out various alternatives in subsequent drafts. Now I'll just drop my editor a quick email, if some really radical change to the outline needs to happen, saying 'oh, you know that bit where... actually now, it's going to be...'.

So I will continue to advise aspiring writers to do as much advance thinking and planning as they personally can stand, whether or not they actually write any of it down, before typing "Chapter One".