WEEKLY UPDATE: In which I look to the Greats
Another two rejections since my last blog. I’m really collecting them.
As I said in my last blog, I’ve been working on my second book in order to distract me from the fact that I can’t seem to get anyone to want the book I’ve been writing since 2019. (Not that I’m bitter or anything.) This current book is still very much in the planning stage, but I’m enjoying it. I’m allowing myself to enjoy the process this time, to be accurate about it. If nothing else, it’s that being rejected so many times has made it finally sink in that this will take a while. So I might as well write the best story I can and try to avoid the temptation to race after fame and validation.
Enough therapy. Let’s talk process.
As I’ve probably mentioned before, writers can be divided into two distinct camps. Plotters, who are people who plan the novel and the world it inhabits down to the finest detail before even putting pen to paper. And Pantsers, who come up with an idea, start writing, and hope that they can come up with anything they might need as they go.
There are pros and cons to both approaches. Plotters tend to be incredibly slow-they get lost in the weeds of their own world and planned character arcs, and more often than not worldbuilding is used as a form of procrastination. Pansters, meanwhile, often go incredibly quickly but are vulnerable to narrative speedbumps or simply running out of steam mid-novel. They can write a lot in a short period of time, but ninety percent of it does not make sense at all.
I’ve always been a Pantser. Like George RR Martin or Sarah J Maas, I treat stories like seeds I’ve scattered in a garden. I know the outline of what a story will be-I know what type of seed I’ve planted-but I won’t know how many leaves it will have or how tall it will be until I’ve finished growing it. Or, to put it another way, I get excited about an idea and I need to get it down as quickly as possible so it can be shared with everyone as quickly as possible. To me, being a Pantser equals having speed, which makes the authors I’ve mentioned as pretty bad examples-Maas only recently completed the first draft of her sixth book after almost half a decade, and it’s almost become a running joke that the Game of Thrones books will never be completed despite Martin claiming he’s working hard to finish the next one.
But what of the Plotters? JRR Tolkien is probably the most famous example of a Plotter, but NK Jemisin is also an author who takes time and care to craft a whole world before diving into it. To varying degrees, admittedly-Tolkien created elvish, a whole language, essentially from scratch before he even started writing the Hobbit, and the appendices and lore of the Lord of the Rings are almost a complete series of novels in themselves. But Jemisin and Rowling and other “great” fantasy authors still put in a lot of work building the world of their books before they started writing.
Where does this leave me? I suppose my previous novel taught me that I need to take more time and care planning a world before sitting down to write. Intellectually, I’m aware that it’s better to go slow and get it right than rush in and get tossed back out again. That would be the sensible thing to do.
But. But.
I also still aim to write at least 2000 words a day (or 1000 if I’m on late shifts at work). I still have this drive to work hard and get it done as fast as possible, because I know that the longer I take writing, the longer it will be before I actually make any progress in becoming an author. Emotionally, anyway, I know this.
Surely there’s a happy medium. And, surely, I need to find it if I want this book to work.
