JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #60
July 15, 2021
What does it mean to write? What does the activity of writing look like? Here’s what I think it is.
Ok, how to start? She walked--She? what’s the POV? Is she too close? Let’s start a bit farther out: Diane walked--Diane? Is that too Roman? Laura? I know too many Lauras. Patricia? Suggests age perhaps. Patricia walked--strode? approached? stepped?--Patricia stepped up to the counter--what is she really stepping up to? Not the counter, not the window, let’s get to the person: Patricia stepped up to the teller--the teller or a teller? Is she being deliberate or is it happenstance? She picked this specific person: Patricia stepped up to the teller and slammed--I’m starting too early: Patricia slammed the stack of bills--what do you call a stack of bills? Is there an appropriate term here? I’m imagining a stack with a strap: are those called straps or am I making that up? Bundle? Patricia slammed the cash stack down in front of the teller. Or maybe....
Once when I described this process someone told me, Just get it down! You can edit later. I told him that this isn’t editing--this is writing. Writing is discovering how to say something, how to get what’s in your head into someone else’s head, and every word matters. Every word is an impossible decision among myriads, each choice but the beginning of an infinite array of potential. I can’t say that the above example is really how I’d write that single sentence in a first draft. More likely I’d go through some subset of these considerations trying to get a couple of lines down before I move on, and I’d hit the rest (among other decisions) in subsequent revision passes. But this is how writing looks to me.
Writing is hard. It’s a lot of work. Sometimes I stop in the middle of a sentence to do research. Sometimes I hit a dictionary to make sure a word means what I think it means. Sometimes I can’t think of the right word, it’s on the tip of my tongue, it starts with a C, so I browse a thesaurus trying to triangulate via words with similar meanings until I find the one I was thinking of--and sometimes it’s actually not the right word, but it reminds me of a different word that works better. Sometimes I decide that the entire paragraph went off in the wrong direction and I need to back up and try again. And hovering above it all are concerns about characterization and the unfolding plot (or argument if I’m writing a paper).
This is what I think writing entails. What do you think?