I’m a very haphazard writer. In our writing circles we talk about people who plot their work really carefully in advance, and then people who fly by the seat of their pants and create in chaos. And I’m definitely more of a chaos type of writer. So, you know, I often write scenes out of order, I write whatever comes to mind. I just start putting things on the page that I know are part of a particular story and I just keep adding and adding and adding, up until the point when I don’t know what to add anymore, I feel like I have some material, I get confused and stuck, and then I print it all out and try to put it all together where it ends up being sort of like a jigsaw puzzle.
I have all this material, I know it’s part of this story, but I have to find the order that it goes in. I have to find a way to make it make sense to someone else. It always makes sense in my mind. But I need it to make sense to someone else. And so a lot of the work that I put into revision is around plotting and structure and the flow of the piece. And I spend a lot less time early in the book worrying about the line edit aspect of things and how things are line by line on the page.
I think that my line-by-line writing is actually fairly organically smooth, which I’m fortunate to be in that position. And so a lot of what I am working on, a lot of what I struggle with is the bigger picture things and knitting all of the pieces together. That’s actually why I write in vignettes often, because it’s how the work comes to me in these chunks and then I enjoy weaving some of those gaps for the reader to fill in and jumping from what’s important to what else is important as opposed to deliberately looking to fill in every single hole.
