Jul. 10th, 2010

coyotesuspect: (stock: write or die)
A while ago, I read this article about Agatha Christie's writing style. It's an interesting article, worth the read, and the meat of it is that Agatha Christie was a messy, disorganized writer. But what really struck me about it was that 1) my method of writing is just like Agatha Christie's and 2) the writer of the article is completely and utterly befuddled by this.

An excerpt:

 

What, then, could be more shocking than to discover that the dame was no lady? Agatha didn't sit at a pristine desk neatly typing her novels, Chapter 1 followed by Chapter 2, and so on, before donning gloves and descending at 6 p.m. for a sherry

Her less-than-refined writerly day began with finding her notebook, which surely she'd left right there. Then, having found a notebook (not the one she'd used yesterday), and staring in stunned amazement at the illegible chicken scratchings therein, she would finally settle down to jab at elusive characters and oil creaky plots. Most astonishing, Curran discovers that for all her assured skewering of human character in a finished novel, sometimes when Christie started her books, even she didn't know who the murderer was.
This is exactly how I write. I hobble stories together. I have multiple notebooks, and a single notebook can contain no less than: notes for three different classes, to do lists, contact info, lists of things I like, doodles, and bits and pieces of innumerable fics. I often lose- and then find- these notebooks. And they'll go in and out of rotation. A notebook I wrote in for three weeks will be put to the side for two months before I eventually rediscover it and start writing in it again.

And this is why you should always have a goat as a travelling companion. )

But not everyone writes like this. To some people, like the author of the article, it is, apparently, completely alien. So my question to you, f'list, is, how do you write? Do you write scene by scene?  Do you outline? Do you use some kind of wonderful organizational system? Do you rely too much on inspiration, or do you just sit down and hammer your way through something? What works for you? I'm curious.

---

This post brought to by a conversation with [info]cherie_morte and [info]scorpiod1 . We were also discussing who tops: John or Uriel, so just be glad I didn't make a post about that.


Girlchesters thank you for your time.




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