Stay As Close To The Prose As Possible
I keep a journal open next to me where I jot down insights inspired by the particular challenges I’m facing on the page (a bottomless well, as it turns out).
Recently, a theme emerged: Stay as close to the prose as possible. Write bottom-up, not top-down.
This means avoiding abstractions. And no outlines.
George Saunders On Polishing As You Go
My method is: I imagine a meter mounted in my forehead, with “P” on this side (“Positive”) and “N” on this side (“Negative”). I try to read what I’ve written uninflectedly, the way a first-time reader might (“without hope and without despair”). Where’s the needle? Accept the result without whining. Then edit, so as to move the needle into the “P” zone. Enact a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (rinse, lather, repeat), through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts. Like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via those thousands of incremental adjustments.
The artist, in this model, is like the optometrist, always asking: Is it better like this? Or like this?
The interesting thing, in my experience, is that the result of this laborious and slightly obsessive process is a story that is better than I am in “real life” – funnier, kinder, less full of crap, more empathetic, with a clearer sense of virtue, both wiser and more entertaining.
And what a pleasure that is; to be, on the page, less of a dope than usual.
Outlines, tropes, plot structures—how much of that do your readers actually see? Fucking none of it. So why do we waste so much time as writers trying to shoehorn our stories into a “Hero’s Journey?”
And for the love of Goddess—stop trying to save the f-ing cat! Let it die. It has 9 lives—every one of them better than the last.
The Author Behind Detective Harry Bosch On Not Outlining
Describe your routine when conceiving of a book and its plot, before the writing begins. Do you like to map out your books ahead of time, or just let it flow?
I don’t map out anything. I put nothing on paper but the books themselves. I don’t outline, I only carry in my head. At any given time I’ll have one or two other ideas percolating. When I told you that it takes more time for me to research a Lincoln Lawyer book, it doesn’t mean I’m not writing. I’m always writing one project while I’m researching the next one. It’s hard to describe how projects move into each other, or on the same planes. It usually takes me eleven months to write a book, and the last 3 or 4 months are probably where all I’m doing is writing that book. But a good chunk in the early stages where I’m either gathering string for the next book, or running it through my head, but I don’t put anything on paper. I’ll just know how my books are going to begin and end, and the stuff in between is ripe for improvisation.
