The Writer's Process

I had two conversations about the writer's process yesterday. One was with a student who was amazed to hear that I went through many drafts before considering my work finished (the never ending book has, in fact, had two endings so far, but I'm about to write number three), and the other was with a fellow writer who mentioned that he had the same process. "I think of the first draft as just getting my ideas down," he said. "It's only after that that I 'write' the book."

I daresay that there are some writers for whom the words just flow in perfect order - like Mozart taking dictation - but for most writing is a process. Some will plan and then write, others will write and then plan. It doesn't matter what your process is, and it may take some time and plenty of trial and error before you work out what your personal process is.

There will almost certainly be several phases:

A thinking phase.

A writing phase.

A planning phase.

A re-writing phase.

A fine tuning phase.

But the order in which you tackle each phase is personal to you. So, some people go chapter by chapter, thinking, planning, writing, re-writing, fine tuning. Others will write a whole mad first draft in a great burst of energy, and then start the thinking and planning processes. The order you do things in doesn't matter, so long as you do them.

My mother told me not to fret about when my babies walked, or talked or was potty trained, on the grounds that they'd all manage it by 18. It's the end product that matters, not how you get there.

Just Like Your Mother Said

One of the irritating things about growing up is that you discover yourself saying things your mother said to you. Once you rebelled, now you've become a doppelganger. My mother used to say Practice Makes Perfect to the grumpy teenage me, and it made me determined to do as little practice as possible. But grudgingly I have to admit that, as far as writing goes, practice makes...well, not perfection, but it does make it easier.

I can remember those essays at school when filling two sides of A4 seemed an impossibility. At university essays were supposed to be longer, though I'm not sure I ever achieved anything like the required length. My first short story was 400 words and I couldn't imagine how on earth it could ever be any longer. On my MA, I can remember gaily padding out my 3000 word essay with as many quotes as I thought I could get away with. (I only just managed to squeak a pass mark so I think they noticed.)

But now, nearly ten years of writing short stories and novels has left its mark. Give me a keyboard and I'll rattle off a couple of thousand words without a problem. Novels are about 500-700 words an hour, other writing - blogs, emails etc - is more like 1000 words an hour. Transferring words from my head to the page has become, with practice, a natural process. Writers write, and the more they write the more writerly they become. Just like my mother almost said.