Trusting the Creative Process

 Happy Summer Solstice, all!

This week at the SFF Seven, we're talking about our greatest writing challenge and how we manage it.

In some ways, this is a moving target for me, because it seems that - like clockwork - each book presents its own challenge. With 64 published titles under my belt, I feel like I should have this process down and there shouldn't be surprises.

No such luck.

What I have to constantly remind myself is that the creative process is its own creature. It's this connection to something beyond ourselves and thus is not within our control. Particularly for a writer like myself - I am incapable of pre-plotting and write for discovery, relying entirely on intuition - letting go of that desire to control is critical. It can also be difficult, especially when I'm trying to write to a particular idea or market.

For example, I recently wrote one-hundred pages of a book for my agent, according to a very particular comp. Let's call it Ghost meets Out of Africa. (That is NOT it, but that's one of my all-time favorite fictional comps. Points if you can name the movie it's from.) In thinking about this project, I consulted my friend, Melinda Snodgrass, incredibly talented novelist and screenwriter who counts among her credits the Star Trek: Next Generation episode The Measure of a Man. I asked her how closely I should follow the beats of Ghost, if at all. She gave me an incredulous look and asked why, when I had a hugely successful story blueprint right there, I would do anything but follow those beats?

So, I tried.

Turns out that, not only am I incapable of pre-plotting, I also can't follow an outline to save my life. I struggled to write that book. Having the story laid out in essence should have made it easier. Instead it made it 1,000x worse. For me. Because that's not my process. Once I abandoned that outline (sorry, Melinda) and followed my intuition, the words began flowing.

That's the major challenge for me: remembering to trust the process. Particulars change with every book. This principle endures.

FanFiction: Which Playground

Every writer started writing by being a reader. Sometimes as a voracious one. The mental stacks pile high, creaking under the weight of other people's characters, plots, worlds, languages, and adventures. A writer's lifetime of reading (and movies, TV, music, other art - wherever story can be found) becomes the fertile soil out of which her own stories sprout. My strong suspicion is that we're all of us writing fanfiction after a fashion - in this case, it's our stories that stand on the shoulders of giants. Though most of us have enough imagination to avoid cease and desist letters from publishers. 

Granted, I do have a few stories in my files from my early days as a writer that are unabashed fanfic. They are complete copywrite violations. But I think they taught me voice. I could switch from writing a story in Anne McCaffrey's Pern and make it come close to matching her tone, then I could write a Star Trek story that I thought did a fine job of matching the tone of those characters. From there, you can deduce which worlds I'd write in if I could. Star Trek. Anne McCaffrey's Dragon Rider series. Anything Andre Norton - except The Witch World series. That one's not my fav. I'd totally write within the worlds of some of the MMORPGs out there in the world. 

Since I'm not authorized to write officially in anyone else's playground, I simply acknowledge that I am paying homage to each of my literary heroes in what I write. I hope.