Writing is hard, part II: working your way in

Normally when I’m working on something, I prefer to either be creating — writing a first draft, brainstorming a new idea — or editing. But at the moment I’m in the middle of both, deep into a new short story while I edit another one. And because I have to exercise different muscles for each exercise, it’s not surprising that one technique is starting to bleed into the other. And that I’ve become hyper-aware of a particular habit that I wonder if I’ll ever break.

One of the reasons I feared writing a novel for years was because of how I used to write short stories. Or at least, how I thought I wrote them: come up with an idea, usually during a long walk or some other activity which required me to be away from the computer, and then write the first draft all in one go. This was fine when the stories I wrote were pretty short, but less so when I would wake up from a feverish state and find I’d written over 5000 words in an evening. Or when I was so overcome by the idea that I had to get it down on paper — literally, because I wasn’t near my computer at the time. At least I can read my own handwriting, because no one else can…

This method, however gruelling, seemed to work for me, in that all the stories I produced this way ended up getting published somewhere, while all the ones written at a more leisurely pace are either in submission hell or languishing on my hard drive. The only problem is that the more stories I write, the more complex they get, and the more a recurring problem crops up: I open the story a lot later than I think I do.

It’s an odd habit because at least so far, I can’t begin a story unless I have a pretty clear idea of what the opening is. Usually it’s dialogue, or at least having a sense of a character’s voice or predicament, and off I go (it’s the same reason why I usually need to have a title in place either right before I begin writing, or at least when I save the story for the first time.) But because I like to try something different with each story I write, there’s much more planning and forethought that seems to go into it.

At the moment I seem to be obsessed with story structure, and experimenting to tell a crime story in a less than linear fashion. Maybe it’s the way my brain works, but why shouldn’t I include lots of different points of view, stories within stories, economical word counts and all that? It’s fun. But it means the margin of error can be pretty tight, and often requires fixing later on.

For the last Blog Short Story project I originally opened my story with the 1960s time period. And it would have worked fine, but something felt off — that I was giving away the story somehow, or that it was too fragmenting to begin the story and then jump back to the 1930s narrative. So I shifted that “prologue” to a later point and the story got much stronger as a result. Of course, I look at it now and still see lots of things to improve, but that’s a side point.

The story I’m editing at the moment has seen several eyes. And this was borne out of the classic “all in a rush” fervor I’ve already described. I edited it myself then sent it off, and the first reader suggested some changes, but nothing structural. Then the second reader came in and thought it was a different story altogether. I had parallel narratives but in his opinion, they clashed and cancelled each other out.

But I loved the opening. Oh, how I loved that opening. It was fast, it was funny, everything worked…but what did I have to lose? So I moved it to about a third of the way into the story. Added in some other stuff to the other narrative and beefed up its significance.

And so far, it works better. There’s more work to be done, in all likelihood, but I think it’ll be a much stronger story for all the editing. But I wish I’d been able to see this earlier, because maybe I wouldn’t have had to spend so much time reworking the story.

Or maybe it’s just part of my writing style to have to wade through a bunch of muck until I get to the true opening of a story, or a novel.

Which brings me to this: does anyone else do this? Or what’s a particular writing tic that’s something you have to get through, and might even be part of your process? And did you ever start off with one recurring problem and lose it, only to acquire another one at a later point?