The previous post about thinking made me consider the division in writing between creative freedom on one extreme and writing to order on the other. Of course, this is not a black and white issue and the shades of grey in between apply to most fiction writers who need to have a healthy mix of the two to be able to sell their work.
Reading post by other writers helped me to analyse this. Emma Darwin writes about the journey of the novel in her excellent This Itch of Writing blog where she discusses the methodology of taking an idea and sculpting it into an object. Steve Feasey discusses how he values trust in his writing process in his interesting blog about his writing process.
These two concepts reminded me of a marketing course I attended last year about how much control we have over our product. Applied to writing, the product becomes the novel. Just typing that slightly grates against my creative self, but if you intend to sell your work it does become a product.
So, there are clearly two processes running alongside each other in writing: a set of ‘how to’ instructions, where experts authors pass knowledge about structure, grammar, spelling, presentation, and the theory of writing. All these written-down-in-informative-list-style pieces of knowledge are the tangible aspects of writing. Of course, we are all very familiar with this as it’s what we did at school – we were taught to write in the form of taught language. The tangibles are what we use to demonstrate that we have followed a course of study and are now climbing the hierarchy of the literary community, a shared knowledege that is silently acknowledged as the route to publication. This applies whether a writer is published or not; because of the tangible nature of goal seeking, there’s always another, better prize on the horizon.
Then there are the intangible benefits of writing. Steve mentions trust in the context of trusting the process, a knowing that at the end of it all it will have been worth it as other people will resonate with his work. This is somehow instinctively apart from the quest from validation from publication, it involves an element of care. Learning to trust is one intangible benefit of writing. Hand in hand with persistence and reflexivity, trust guides the journey. Checking the external world for validation of tangibles ensures that you are meeting the concrete needs of qualification with peers; checking yourself for intangibles ensures that you are happy with the journey and that you don’t need to adjust your internal satnav. And love. We fall in love with our work and the nature of this romance was covered here. This also applies regardless of publication, as even published writers have to decide if they are happy with the way their professional life in going and if, in fact, life as an author meets the glittering expectation of the unpublished writer.
Some writers live in fear of rejection, looking around at the tangible evidence of their journey, they cannot understand why it’s not working, why their work is not published, why others with the same style and level of writing are. They write, they submit, they receive rejections, they say they will give up. They start another novel. And they wonder why they are putting themselves through it. I think the answer lies in the intangible benefits. The true emotional journey of the writing process.
To be continued…