Rules-based versus organic writing

[Svrtnsse]

Oh, and thanks for explaining what MRU is.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

Yeah, I think if a writer tells well enough, nobody will give a crap, LOL. Telling is most obvious when the writing is less finely crafted. And it is story telling, after all. heh heh.

And no, it's not entirely tell, just from a glance. Although it does go heavily into setting the character through past stuff. Just a glance anyhow. This sort of character history telling is fairly common place, particularly in classics and I would presume historical fiction sort of stuff. I don't know the book from boo, but it has a romance-ish historic feel, where I'd guess this sort of intro is welcome.

Can I make a quick comment on this? I'm currently reading this: The Champagne Queen and the first chapter is entirely tell. Yet I love it because she's swept me into her world just telling me a story. The way it's written, I'd say that most critiquers would label her style telling and tell her to rewrite it. But it works just fine as is, and it's a beautiful novel.

I don't have much to add to this lengthy conversation except to say that I still don't know what an MRU is. It sounds like a military meal of some sort. I do think about the other things mentioned, which I hesitate to label as rules because there really are no rules in writing except to entertain the reader.

In a way, my understanding of why folks discuss these techniques is clearer to me now that I've had some time to think about it. In no way did I intend to be disrespectful in the other thread. Everyone has their level of where they're at and these concepts are mostly new to me. I've never read Maas. I've read Coyne and James Scott Bell and other wonderful authors who write craft books. I apply what I learn to my books, learn from my editor(s), beta readers, and other writers I work with. This, in part, is why I agree with Devor who mentioned that we adopt these methods and apply them to our work thus making it intuitive. If anything, deeper study of craft has allowed me to:
a) add new methods to my work
b) understand what I was already doing and improve it.

 

[Aurora]

Oh, and thanks for explaining what MRU is.

Me, too! I was hoping they'd come with cigarettes though.

 

[Svrtnsse]

1) How much do you use formal writing techniques when developing your style?

2) How much do you focus on your prose while writing versus editing?

I'd like to get in on the second question here.

I have a really hard time letting go of my prose when I'm writing, even if it's the first draft. I often stop and tweak things to make sure it reads right and that the words flow easily. I know it's just the first draft and that I might change or cut out the entire thing later on, but I still have a hard time leaving bad prose alone. It just irks me.

That said, when it comes down to consecutive drafts, there's not much editing that needs doing as far as prose goes. It's mainly structural things like how sections or chapters don't work. This of course means that all the time I spent on polishing the prose for those passages gets thrown out, but if that's the case then so be it.

What I'm trying to do to compensate this is to have a detailed outline. I try to do multiple passes on the outline and add details every time so that little by little the story takes shape. Then, once it becomes time to start on the actual story, its a bit like painting by numbers where I know everything that's going to happen and I just need to find the pretty words to make it read nicely.

Sure, there will still be sections that don't work and that will need to be redone, but at least they'll only be sections and not the entire thing.

 

[FifthView]

"Techniques" is a much better word than either rule or guideline. And I like the quote by Swain, which is at odds with the advice that if you want to produce something of quality you must employ x, y, or z. Going back to the admonition to have microtensions on every page, if I understand Swain correctly he's saying whether you follow advice like that or not doesn't necessarily impact the literary quality of the resulting work.

I think it's hard to see that x, y, z are useful for improving a manuscript and then think that they are unimportant. Assessing their relative importance might be the job of the writer who is writing any given story.

What did Swain mean? His book covered many other things besides MRUs. Saying No writer uses all of them and No writer can avoid using some of them leaves the door wide open vis-à-vis any of the techniques he covered, heh.

The more specific assertion, [T]hese techniques have little bearing on literary quality or the lack of it, probably addresses the fact that a story involves so many more things than simply these techniques; and also, how these techniques are used, whether they are used, in relation to the content and those other aspects of a story, make the difference. Plus, everything combines to create a unique author voice and approach to telling that story. Basically, these techniques aren't auto-win approaches.

Edit: I suppose much of that last paragraph could be rewritten to include a consideration of the author's vision. I feel this is somewhat where I am lacking, and the same thing happened when I studied poetry. I learned all these techniques and could apply this learning to reading and analyzing finished works, but my own vision for what I wanted to do, starting with a blank page, has often been fuzzy. The tools can't provide that vision.

 

[FifthView]

I have a really hard time letting go of my prose when I'm writing, even if it's the first draft. I often stop and tweak things to make sure it reads right and that the words flow easily. I know it's just the first draft and that I might change or cut out the entire thing later on, but I still have a hard time leaving bad prose alone. It just irks me.

I'm the same. This immediate revision might not always happen immediately–sometimes, it's the next day as I look over what I wrote the day before–but I'm not one to write full steam ahead without looking back until the whole first draft is written or even a whole chapter.

That said, when it comes down to consecutive drafts, there's not much editing that needs doing as far as prose goes. It's mainly structural things like how sections or chapters don't work. This of course means that all the time I spent on polishing the prose for those passages gets thrown out, but if that's the case then so be it.

This is interesting because, funnily enough, even though I edit prose as I go, I always manage to find that it needs editing later, too. I think this is about freshness. Quick edits might get me to a place where I think the prose is much better than it was at first, but after enough time passes (later down the manuscript), I'll see that much-improved prose and discover that it's still lacking in some way.

 

[Demesnedenoir]

There's always more editing to be done, heh heh. I don't splat write, what I put down needs to be solid, not "finish" quality, but solid in how and what I am saying. This also tends to leave out some tidbits, most often description for me. Or subtext.

Last night I wrote a scene, took a while, but the dialogue and most important stuff is there, but in the "organic" writing mode the subtext of conflict between two men who like the same woman came out soft. The conversation was good, but it just didn't want to go there. It's exists, but I've a note to amp it up a little bit or readers are likely to zip on by.

White rooms in early drafts are fairly common, as I'm heavily focused on what's important to the scene and the characters.

Subtext and microtension are kissing cousins.

 

[skip.knox]

Oh, and thanks for explaining what MRU is.

Meals Ready to Upchuck

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

Bruce Lee comes to mind here... I know, bear with me a moment.

In his philosophy of Jeet Kun do, Bruce Lee was known to say that a trained fighter that can forget his training is the most dangerous. What he was talking about was muscle memory, or the automatic response in the human mind-body connection that all training, regardless of physical discipline, aspires to achieve.

Writing, I think, is similar. When we first start out, many of us settle in to learn everything we can about craft. We focus on specific techniques, debate endlessly about rules, develop personal styles that rely heavily on methods we've tried that fit our goals and vision. At some point, the finer details fall to the background and storytelling becomes, once again, the primary focus. However, now we have a firmer grasp on how we need to write (the techniques and methods we adopted) to be able to actually execute that vision.

Much like the trained fighter, we no longer need to consciously think about the rules we've adopted. They've become second nature. We're free to focus more on story. We're free to focus our study on higher concepts, like differing levels of emotion in our characters.