{"id":143,"date":"2014-03-06T15:24:50","date_gmt":"2014-03-06T20:24:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bobwaldnerbooks.com\/?p=143"},"modified":"2014-03-06T15:28:36","modified_gmt":"2014-03-06T20:28:36","slug":"143","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bobwaldnerbooks.com\/?p=143","title":{"rendered":"No method at all…"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my all-time favorite novels is Catch-22<\/em>, so when I came across an interview in which Joseph Heller discussed the process of writing it, I was completely sucked in.\u00a0 The interview took place in 1974 (you can read it here<\/a>, if you’re interested), so it’s not exactly breaking news, but, until recently, I hadn’t given much thought to the\u00a0manner in which\u00a0a novel was written.\u00a0 Even as I wrote my first one, I never really considered my approach to it.\u00a0 It wasn’t until I started working on a second book that I became\u00a0conscious of my method (or maybe my lack thereof).<\/p>\n

At the end of the day, everyone’s mind works differently, so I’m not sure how much we can take from studying another writer’s process,\u00a0at least in a practical sense.\u00a0 For example, Heller said that he didn’t begin his novels with a theme or\u00a0a character in mind.\u00a0 Instead, he thought of an opening line, and then let the story evolve from the possibilities that were suggested by that sentence.\u00a0 According to him, within an hour and a half of coming up with “It was love at first sight…” he’d figured out the form, the tone and many of the\u00a0characters in Catch-22<\/em>.\u00a0 He wrote the first chapter that week, and then sent it to his agent.\u00a0 A full\u00a0year of planning followed before he began chapter two.<\/p>\n

I found all of that quite fascinating, but it’s not something that I plan to try for myself.\u00a0 I am decidedly not the sort of writer that maps a whole story out before I start typing.\u00a0 I wrote about a third of Peripheral Involvement <\/em>before I figured out what it was really about.\u00a0\u00a0When I started it, I\u00a0imagined it\u00a0as a satire.\u00a0 Over time, it evolved into something with more of a mystery\/suspense element (I’ll save my thoughts about genres for another post), but even once I started going in that direction, I pretty much made it up as I went along.\u00a0 I didn’t know how it was all going to\u00a0come out\u00a0until just before I wrote the ending.<\/p>\n

I’m sure that part of the reason that I went about it the way I did was the long timeline over which I wrote the book, so I was very curious to see how things would go when I tried to write a second one.\u00a0 I hoped to be able to come up with an outline, and to have a pretty good sense of the story before I started.\u00a0 It\u00a0hasn’t worked out that way.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The only thing that I was able to figure out\u00a0before I began\u00a0was that I wanted to set the novel in the Florida Keys.\u00a0 I chewed on that for a while before I came up with an idea for a character (a ne’er do well gambler whose family circumstances take him to the Keys after government regulation puts an end to his career as an online poker player).\u00a0 So that’s what I started with, and it wasn’t until after I’d written a bit that I started to populate my character’s universe (with the likes of a sleazy local lawyer and a disgraced former televangelist, to name two).\u00a0 And it wasn’t until I’d\u00a0gotten though\u00a0a few scenes with them that I figured out where the story was going to go from there.<\/p>\n

At this point, I’ve written about 55,000 words of the second novel, and I feel like I have a pretty clear vision of where I want to take it (although, given my track record, I wouldn’t be shocked if it continued to evolve).\u00a0 In that sense, it developed\u00a0much more quickly than Peripheral Involvement<\/em> did, but I suppose that’s not a suprise.<\/p>\n

I’m curious to hear from others on this.\u00a0 How much (or how little) do you figure out before you start writing?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my all-time favorite novels is Catch-22, so when I came across an interview in which Joseph Heller discussed the process of writing it, I was completely sucked in.  The interview took place in 1974 (you can read it here, if you’re interested), so it’s not exactly breaking news, but, until recently, I hadn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing"],"yoast_head":"\nNo method at all... - 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