Of Left and Write

Yesterday I began a reply to Bloglily on how I plan my writing projects — to the extent what happens is actually planned. Here’s the rest of my answer.

Foremost in any project for me now is drawing the plot as tight as I can, and not putting anything into the working draft that doesn’t serve the plot.

So I work with lots of notes, sketching characters and themes, but am stingy in what makes it into the polished piece. Finished stories often have twice as many words in the draft files as they have in the final, streamlined version.

My biggest problem has been how to stay on track with that taut plotline. Specifically, this little distraction called working for a living. It’s not really just that the jobs have usually gotten the most productive hours of my day; I can work around that.

What happens for me is that the delays of working life often provide jaunty little distracting themes and subplots — so I have to guard against the next great notion coming along and derailing the project.

I’ve found that jobs do this in two different ways. One has been the jobs that were so taxing they ate my brain; a few of my jobs have been neurologically taxing enough that I just don’t have the juice left to write, day in, day out.

In one, I didn’t have to start work until 9 a.m. and the job was about ten minutes from home. So I had a significant chunk of my mornings free, and made some progress, but not as much as I’d have liked.

The other fiction friction that has worn me down is an early start to the workday — having to rise early to commute in for an early work-start. It’s just difficult for me to hew to the demands of a large plot when most of my mornings are gone.

But enough whining — having identified the obstacles, I should now use my left hemisphere and plan for them, right? I do have a bit of insomnia, I often wake early and have writing ideas buzzing around my cranium, and it’s really just a matter of my making the best of this and working with the cards I’ve been dealt.

Which is where I’m at lately. Because of the interruptions built into my daily life, longer pieces are more difficult, so I’m working on a series of vignettes. They’re based on the same cast of characters with conflicting personalities. it’s dialog-driven; a topic can be introduced, the disparate points of view developed, and I can draft each piece in a day or so, then edit and polish it without the disruptions that derail longer pieces.

Of course, since then, an old idea has erupted over the holidays and I’ve been drafting notes for a novel — all the while with a little voice in the back of my head (the planning left mind), saying, ‘Are you nuts? What are you thinking, picking up this old notion and imagining you’ll be able to write this while working a job that has you up between 5:30 and 6 a.m. and not home again until 6 at night?’

And the right mind is saying, ‘You can do this. You have 90% of the plot worked out. You know what this story needs to work. If you line up the scenes and hew to the plot, you can do this.’

Yeah, my right mind is perhaps overly optimistic. And my left mind grasps the scope of the project (perhaps punctuated with a few !?!?!? marks) and outlines a to-do list to get there.

To see if the twain shall ever meet would probably entail a conversation with my corpus callosum — a topic for another post?