Shitty first drafts, or edit-as-you-go?
Anne Lamott famously touted the importance of writing what she calls the Shitty First Draft, which is a fantastic tool for a writer to use when they feel self-conscious about their writing. Get it all down and out, she says, just get the words and story on the page. Editing can come later. You can always rewrite. Loosen up and let the child inside you scribble your story without any worry about the quality of the work.
But for a perfectionist it's hard to move on from a paragraph that stinks. You want to turn around and immediately polish, because it's seems easier to clean up your mess as you go, rather than have a big pile of hundreds of thousands of words to reconfigure. It means you work slower, but the end result is a cleaner mess.
My preference? Oh, I'm a sloppy first drafter. It's disheartening once the draft is finished and I actually sit down to read through the mess I've created, but it makes for quite the writer's high when the first draft is finished.
Plotter, or pantser?
To write more effectively, some people suggest, you must know what you're going to write before you write it. Know how it ends. Know your character's fears. Know when the antagonist appears to be winning, and when the tables turn. Have lists ready made, have your research completed.
For other people, outlining takes away all spontaneity. For other people, writing is about discovery. What a character does on page 50 isn't known until the writer gets to page 50. The ending might not be a surprise, but how the characters get there might be. It's called "pantsing," since you write by the seat of your pants. Sometimes you're sick of your story before you even write a single word, so this helps.
My preference? I'm a chronic plotter. I know every scene, every beat before I begin actually writing. Although--I've just started a new project, a (gasp!) book for grown-ups, and all I know is my first scene. That's it. I don't know anything else. And so far, I love writing this without knowing what will happen next. Who knows? Maybe I'm a secret pantser.
Architect, or gardener?
This is a phrase coined by my friend and brilliant writer, Bree. Architects, she says, are writers whose main concern is STORY. Story. Just the word makes me tingle. I'm clearly an architect. The words don't matter. The poetry of the words doesn't matter. Just tell the story. What's the story? What happens to the character? Where do they go? Why? Architects probably love to outline. They love the arcs. They would paraphrase their stories, if they could, but people read books, not summaries.
Gardeners, on the other hand, could be given an outline to fill out and be happy. They probably line edit like crazy, searching for the perfect description, perfect dialogue, perfect word. The language is important. Beautiful. Flowery.
My preference? I'm an architect, as stated. I could outline story after story, never actually writing anything, just thinking about made-up people doing made-up things that are probably only interesting to me.
What about you?
