coyotesuspect

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.

A single fic itself can be scattered across several notebooks, on several pieces of loose sheaf paper, on napkins, and on word documents on my computer. If I'm short paper but have a pen, I'll even write something on my hand before I can move it somewhere more permanent. And I've even drawn scenes before to help figure out how they work. I've gotten a little better at centralizing what I'm writing into one notebook and/or word document. But my immediate impulse is always to scatter everything.

Even now that I'm beginning to keep the physical location for my fics more...in order, I still have no fucking clue what's going on in a fic. With rare exception, I cannot write the beginning first and the ending last. I write the ending first, or I write a scene in the middle first. Or maybe I write the opening scene first, and then skip 3000 words to write two lines of untagged dialogue and then skip another 1000 words to write out the skeleton of another scene. (Character x does this. Then character y does this. X reacts by doing this.)

Even when I know the end scene, I rarely know how to get there. I wrote a casefic recently where the ghost in question was a hoax. I was 3/4ths through writing the story before I'd figured that out, and then adjusted the rest of the story accordingly. cherie_morte , when she read the story, knew the ghost was a hoax as soon as it was brought up. I never outline either; outlining a fic is the surest way to kill my desire to write it. Half the fun of writing is the adventure, is not knowing what's going to happen along the way.

Writing a story- hell, even writing an essay- is like doing a jigsaw puzzle for me. I have all the pieces, but it takes me awhile to figure out how the all fit together. And then boom- it all works. Once I have all the scenes down, I have to figure out the bridges that hold them together. Finishing a fic isn't a satisfying moment of Ah, well, that was the last scene. Excellent. It's an epiphany, a Holy shit. I. I think I'm done? And generally, the last scene I write is one that falls somewhere in the middle.

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.

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