In Today’s Journal
* Chapter 9, Part 2
* Of Interest
Chapter 9: Cycling vs. Editing
Same Technique, Different Processes
Every writer is different, but among those who cycle, all of them perform the first kind of cycling I talked about above whenever necessary. Again, the writer is unstuck in time.
But each writer performs the second kind of cycling in his or her own way:
- Multi-million-copy bestseller Dean Wesley Smith cycles back about every 500 words.
- Ernest Hemingway, at the beginning of his writing day, reportedly reportedly cycled over everything he’d written up to that point in the current story, then started writing again when he reached the white space.
- I personally cycle back through every chapter (every 900 to 1500 words or so). There’s a reason for that.
My own writing sessions last an hour, give or take. I typically write 1000 to 1500 words per hour (that’s only 17 to 25 words per minute), then get up and take a break.
Sometimes the break is long—maybe my wife and I go to the grocery or do some other necessary chore—and sometimes it’s short. For my shortest break, I might get up and walk to the door of my office and back, so a total of about 40 feet, then sit down at the laptop again.
But regardless of the length of the break,
- when I bring up the story or novel again, I read over what I wrote during the previous session.
- I read only for pleasure, not “looking for” anything, and allow my fingertips to rest on the keyboard.
- So as I read, I’m in the characters’ world in my creative subconscious just as I am when I read a story by someone else.
That cycling period usually takes no more than a few minutes, and it allows the characters (not me) to “touch” the story as I read. In other words, if the characters notice I left something out, they use my fingertips to add it.
When I reach the white space again, the characters spring back into action. I write the next sentence that comes to me, then the next and the next as we race through the story and it unfolds around us.
But again, while I’m cycling I’m not using my conscious, critical mind. I’m not editing, and I don’t “look for” anything. That isn’t my job.
The story is the characters’ story. They, not I, am living it. Cycling simply gives them a second chance to add anything I might have missed. Nothing more, nothing less.
That’s all there is to cycling, and that’s really all there is to writing into the dark.
Life happens. Stories happen. Spontaneity is true to life. Anything else is a manipulated construction, not a creation.
Nobody can consciously “think up” anything spontaneous. Spontaneity is a characteristic of real, unscripted life and, in fiction, of the creative subconscious mind.
Writing into the dark is a Zen-like non-technique. No rules—well, other than you must write—no writing myths to obey, and no agony or melodrama. Just writing.
Ray Bradbury did it, Lee Child did it, Stephen King does it, Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch do it, and I do it. In fact, most long-term prolific professional writers perform some version of writing into the dark, cycling as they go.
And consider, only writers who do not write into the dark spend any time fretting over whether they included “too much” or “not enough” description or dialogue and other nonsense like that.
I never even think about that stuff. As I keep saying, I simply race through the story with my characters, and as the story unfolds I write down what happens and what they say and do in response.
As a result, my short stories and novels are accurate representations of the spontaneous, authentic story the characters are actually living.
I wish the same gleeful freedom for you.