The Guinea Pig Report: Uses For Scribblins, #2 of a series
Becoming A Writer, Chapter Seven, cont’d.
The famous sculptor once said* that art was easy; creating a statue of an angel was merely a matter of removing the bits of marble that weren’t angel.
Chris Baty, founder of the annual National Novel Writing Month event, has said of writing** that it’s just like that, except that you have to create the marble too.
Every morning that you “woke to write,” every afternoon or evening when you fulfilled your scheduled writing appointment, that was you visiting the quarry. This stack of scribble you’re looking at now? That’s your marble.
What kind of marble have you quarried?
Brande’s next suggested use for your accumulated writing:
- Find out what kind of writer you are.
Here, in the sheaf of pages you have written during this period of habit-making, is priceless laboratory material for you. What, on the whole do you write, when you set down the first things that occur to you? Try to read, now, as though you had the work of a stranger in your hands, and to discover there what the tastes and talents of this alien writer may be…. [T]his examination will show you where your richest and most easily tapped vein lies.
Again, this at first sounds like something primarily of use to the new writer who has of yet no idea whether he or she is meant to be a novelist or a short story teller, a poet or a prose artist or a screenwriter. And Brande does suggest that this, “The First Survey” (as Chapter Seven is called) will likely reveal the genre you’re destined to inhabit, based on whether you gravitate towards dialogue or long narrative descriptions or character sketches or dream journaling & etc. My first instinct when I reread this chapter is, “Yeah, yeah, yadda-yadda-yadda. Look, I know what my genre is, OK?” I found it more useful to focus on content: what themes and subject matters came up when I performed this exercise over a period of weeks? What was currently foremost on my mind? Were my flights of fancy getting airborne using futuristic spacecraft where previously they had used dragon wings?
But genre and writing format are as much moving targets as topic and theme. When I first began writing short stories in high school, I was convinced that was the sum total of my writing skills. I came up with short story plots. If I were ever to write a book-length work, it would be a collection of interrelated short stories, not a novel.
Then one day someone told me about NaNoWriMo, and I said, “Why not?” At the end of the month, not only did I have the first draft of an actual novel, but I had the realization that many of my preexisting plot ideas really could be novels. For the first time, I identified as a novelist. Or at least an apprentice novelist.
So I’d say that even for the seasoned writer, it’s useful to survey one’s daily output from time to time. We change as people; we change as writers. Periodic examination of our output helps keep us aware of how we’re changing. And being aware of our changing skills and passions helps in turn to keep us writing from our center of our strengths.
*So I’m being sloppy and paraphrasing. So sue me. You go Google it.
**On one of the No Plot? No Problem! Kit daily pep talk cards.
October 8th, 2007 at 5:27 am
I tried NaNoWriMo last year - I only made half the word count, but what I got was a complete novella (I read part of it at WHC although it wasn’t horror). This year I’m trying for a sequel, although my new job has shorter lunch breaks so it may be harder.