George Saunders: what writers really do when they write
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> When I write, “Bob was an asshole,” and then, feeling this perhaps somewhat lacking in specificity, revise it to read, “Bob snapped impatiently at the barista,” then ask myself, seeking yet more specificity, why Bob might have done that, and revise to, “Bob snapped impatiently at the young barista, who reminded him of his dead wife,” and then pause and add, “who he missed so much, especially now, at Christmas,” – I didn’t make that series of changes because I wanted the story to be more compassionate. I did it because I wanted it to be less lame.
Chuck Palahniuk (author of Fight Club) suggests a similar exercise for writers [1].
> From this point forward – at least for the next half year – you may not use “thought” verbs.
> You can’t write: Kenny wondered if Monica didn’t like him going out at night…”
> Instead, you’ll have to Un-pack that to something like: “The mornings after Kenny had stayed out, beyond the last bus, until he’d had to bum a ride or pay for a cab and got home to find Monica faking sleep, faking because she never slept that quiet, those mornings, she’d only put her own cup of coffee in the microwave. Never his.”
Writing "Bob was an asshole" or "Kenny wondered if Monica didn’t like him going out at night." is lazy writing and stops us from exploring the characters and getting to know them.
In the same post, Chuck says: "Thinking is abstract. Knowing and believing are intangible. Your story will always be stronger if you just show the physical actions and details of your characters and allow your reader to do the thinking and knowing. And loving and hating."
[1] https://litreactor.com/essays/chuck-palahniuk/nuts-and-bolts...
>Another reason you’re crying: you’ve just realised that Tolstoy thought well of you – he believed that his own notions about life here on earth would be discernible to you, and would move you.
>Tolstoy imagined you generously, you rose to the occasion.
It reminds me of a line from intro of Björk's "Biophilia" app [0]:
"Sound, harnessed by human beings, delivered with generosity and emotion, is what we call music."
I like it more when we combine music and ideas ...
[1] http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/473592-music-when-combined-w...
I like the basic idea that you needn't know the goal of a piece of writing when you set out, but you learn to edit it.
Some people are going to try to connect that with the way startups iterate. Perhaps that is right, and iterating is a form of editing, but this doesn't illuminate the insight. The actual examples he gives serve to make the idea clearer.
How to Self-Publish a Novel in 2017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13743908 (Last week -- more about the tooling but some discussion of the writing process.)
How to Write a Novel https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12208269 (~8 months ago)
and personally, i needed to be reminded that it's hard for other people too, that it doesn't just come out fully-formed as conventional wisdom might have you believing it should.