One Approach to Writing

 

My intention was to write an essay contrasting my approach to constructing a story – using familiarity and intuition – vs constructing a story from a blueprint of acts, pinch points, reversals, and such. However, that idea rather jumped the tracks when I began to talk about talent as an ingredient in writing, well before I really got to the original subject of the essay.

So, here’s a sort of preamble to that discussion.

I really dislike the term “self-taught,” as in “a self-taught artist.” As a so-called self-taught artist, which is to say, someone who has never taken a course in art, I can tell you that I didn’t teach myself anything. I just learned. I learned by doing. And by doing it over and over again. I learned by looking at the painting of other painters in books. I learned, when I took up oil painting, by looking over books on oil painting techniques, and how to stretch canvas, and such matters. But again, mostly I learned by painting.

And yet, would all that doing and doing have amounted to anything if I didn’t have something else? Something else that can’t be learned. If I didn’t have a “talent” for art? If I didn’t have an aptitude that attracted me to creating pictures with paint and kept me doing it, year after year, decade after decade? I must admit that I think talent is something that can’t be learned. But I could be wrong.

(I will grant you that whether or not I have a talent for art is open to debate. But you can never please everyone, and I don’t try. And my work certainly doesn’t please everyone. But I’m quite comfortable with that.)

Which brings me around to writing.

I enrolled in college as a journalism major because I dreamed about being a writer. But I soon realized that I was far too shy to ever be a journalist, so I changed my major to international relations. I decided that if I had the talent to write, I could become a writer without going to school to learn how. Rightly or wrongly – and even if I couldn’t spell English. (This was long before word processors and personal computers.) I still believe that today.

Since those far gone days, I have approached writing in the same spirit as I approached art. I did it again and again over the years. I have a small collection of rejection slips for the SF magazines of the ‘70’s for a novella, and one for the fantasy novel I wrote. I wrote many “noses” of stories, never getting beyond a few pages. I recently tossed a box full of notes, drawings, and file cards for a SF novel from the 80’s that I never got very far on writing. And I still have a manuscript for a YA adventure novel from the 90’s, the revised version lost when the computer it was on lost power.

So, like in art, I’m a “self-taught” writer. But in the case of writing, it was not just writing, but reading that shaped me into the writer I am today. I have a wall of books, and with all the library books I read, I must have read nearly 2,000 books over these last 60 plus years. I believe that in reading all those books I absorbed on an intuitive level, the art of storytelling. And when I write, I am intuitively recreating the structure and experiences that I encountered, remembered, and enjoyed in all those books that carried me off and away into their worlds of words.

So not only am I a self-taught writer, but an intuitive one as well. I think of a story to tell, piece it together scene by scene as it seems to me it should be told, without thinking much, if at all, of that process. Which brings me around to the subject I set out to talk about – engineering stories. Which is to say, breaking stories down in to discrete pieces – into blueprints like three act plays or hero’s journeys, and components and techniques that build tension, conflict, with turning points, pinch points, reversals, and all the other terms and techniques you can find set out in books, articles, and blog posts on how to write stories. Concepts, which, I must confess, are much like English grammar to me – a mystery.

But I find that I have rambled on too long already to do the subject justice. Plus I really need to do some research into how to write a story this way. So I’ll save my thoughts on constructing stories vs my more intuitive approach for a future blog.

The Secrets of Valsummer House release date: 18 March 2021! Be there, or be square.