First Cup of Coffee - October 22, 2019

About pantsing vs. plotting, and why I prefer "'gardening vs. pre-plotting" as a descriptor. Also protecting and nurturing creativity as a fragile thing, and more thoughts on success as a progressive realization of a worthy goal.

First Cup of Coffee is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find more outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at Frolic.media/podcasts!

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Today is Tuesday, October 22nd. I've got a little bit earlier start today, which is good. Also I've already done an hour of writing. I just got about 600 words that time, but I've um finished my latest round of retracing and layering. I have passed um, what have I, what am I at? Like 39,000 words now? Let's look. Yes, 39,417. So I am rapidly approaching midpoint. Should hit midpoint by uh the end of this week. Yeah, actually before the end of this week. In a couple of days, if all goes well, um, which it kind of is and kind of isn't. Uh this book is definitely a different one to fight, though I know I keep saying that about every book. Oh, and I slipped up, I said to fight, didn't I? There's a Freudian slip for you, right? A different one to write. But it has fought me a little bit. It's been difficult. Um not sure I could even say why. Except it's um well, I guess I do know why it's a different um trajectory in many ways than what I've done before. And also tying up a lot of loose ends, lots of threads. Um, thank you all for the wonderful responses to uh the announcement yesterday about the Frolic Podcast Network. Very excited to welcome new listeners to the show. As I mentioned yesterday, um mine is not not your typical romance affiliated show. Uh it's mainly romance affiliated because I do write romance, fantasy and romance crossover. But I'm an absolute fan of the romance genre and of romance and love in general. So I'm excited to check out some of these other podcasts and hear the stuff they're talking about. It should be a general celebration of all things romance. That's one of my things with the The Fate of the Tala, this book I'm writing now, which is the climactic book for the series. It's book number eight, right? That's what I figured out. Because I've got one out on my desk. I have to keep referencing previous books, and that slows me down too. So, yeah, this will be book number eight, tying up the series, uh, the arc that I began in The Mark of the Tala. That's the title. And it's interesting because each book in the series has featured its own romance, which I wasn't exactly sure I was going to do in the beginning when I started. Um, when I wrote The Tears of the Rose, I wasn't even entirely sure that there would be a romantic romance. It took a little while to come in, but then um gradually I found my footing and found the um structure, I guess, the ways in which the romance factored into the heroine's journeys and adventures. So, in some ways, the fate of the Tala is coming back around and tying up a lot of those, I don't know, the initial questions I put out in the Mark of the Tala. The Mark of the Tala started from a central image. I've talked about this in interviews before, but it came from a dream. Um, a dream that I had that I was inside a castle and that there was a monster outside the castle killing people. And my sister and her husband had vowed to protect me, and they kept sending out people to defeat the monster so that I would be safe, because the monster wanted me, and the monster kept killing the people that they sent, and finally I couldn't stand it anymore. I couldn't stand to have all these people die for me, and so I decided I had to leave the castle and go out there and confront the monster, which I think has some fairly obvious um what subconscious clues in it, life clues there, you know, about um having to go out and face things yourself, not hiding, not relying on others to shield you from a thing. I was also very attracted to the monster in the dream, and so there was a bit of a conflict there within that. Um I was supposed to hide from the monster, but I also kind of wanted to find out more about the monster. And I I love that kind of thing, that you know, being attracted to to the dark and difficult creature. Um maybe to the to the darkness, to the left, uh, the things that are not necessarily of the life light. Uh yeah, and that was always Andy's story from the very beginning about discovering that I'm gonna have to rinse off this contact lens. For those of you new to the contact con has no words today. Those of you new to the podcast, uh, it's very on-brand for me to get distracted and start doing other things, but definitely uh rinsing off my contact lens rather than having uh milky saliva on it, which is what I was about to do. There we go. Because I don't edit. That's you get me chatting for about 20 minutes and it's uh it's real to man. It's like totally real and uh unpolished. So Andy in that first book discovers that the things she's believed all of her life to be right and good are not necessarily that they're a facade. And when she goes out to confront the monster, those of you who've read the book will absolutely know this thing that I'm talking about. Uh, that comes from the dream, which really doesn't happen until about the midpoint of the book. I when I wrote the book, I had to kind of write up to that point and then write after that point, right from that point on to kind of discover what was what was the creature in the dream, what was going on in the dream. So yeah, so in some ways this book is coming back around to you know finally and fully uncover what the monsters are and explore those themes. And I'm taking the romance in a it's a different kind of romance than I've ever written before. So it's I'm not exactly sure where it's gonna go. It's um I mean I know that it's gonna end up happily because not just because of reader expectation, though I absolutely honor reader expectation. Um it's because I fundamentally believe in happiness, and I don't believe in leaving things in a tragic place. I don't think tragic emotions are any more valid than happy ones, which I think our society puts a lot of emphasis on. You know, that the you know, sorrow and death and so forth are somehow the more riveting emotions. So I'm just not exactly sure how I'm gonna get there. And that's part of writing the way I write. I tweeted something yesterday, and uh boy, did that tweet take off a lot more so than I think any tweet I've ever put out there, but it was because I'd seen yet one more class on uh teaching pants how to plot or pre-plan a story. And so I it was sort of burst of frustration, but I said, you know, how come there's so many classes like that? Where are the classes that are, you know, pantsing for plotters? And then I was riffing on various course titles, you know, like um learning to relinquish control and trust your creative flow. And it's gotten so much response. And it's interesting because a whole lot of it is amens and alleluas from my fellow panters. Fist bump to you all. Um, a lot of people who didn't had never heard the term pantsing, which I first heard uh when I went to my very first RWA conference, and I learned it in romance writing circles way earlier than uh than I heard it anywhere else. And it comes from the phrase to fly by the seat of your pants, which is a phrase longtime listeners will know that I really never cared for. Uh to me that's a grabbed my phone. I have a new phone case from the microphone. Jack doesn't quite fit exactly uh as well as it used to. I might have to see about a different phone case so it pulls out more easily, which is unfortunate, but I'll just have to try to sit still better. Not my forte, as you all know. There, I'm getting out of nail file because I found a rough spot on my nail, and I don't want to pick it. So I feel like to fly by the seat of your pants is a phrase that somebody who sees that method of writing as fundamentally out of control would use. So I don't really love it because that's not how I feel. That's really not how I feel when I write. Although I deliberately put it that way in the tweet because I was talking to people who see it that way, you know, and uh all of the there's there feels like just so much pressure to pre-plot a story, and I do make that distinction. Not plot, you know, because the plotters say, Oh, I'm a plotter. It's like, well, you know, if you write a book, you're plotting. It's really, really hard to write a novel that has no plot. Uh, the difference is whether or not you pre-plot, whether or not you plot the story before you write it. So, so that I really don't love that divide that uh the pre-plotters have have somehow claimed plotting and then given those of us who do not pre-plot the moniker of flying by the seat of our pants. For me, I prefer the term to write for discovery. I like misting, which you know is like driving in a fog and you only see as far as the headlights show. I like gardening, which is what George R. Martin uses. He talks about writers being either gardeners or architects. You know, do you have a blueprint that you carefully detail before you begin to build? Or are you someone who plants the seeds of a story and waters it and sees what grows? And and George isn't necessarily the best person to point to at this point because you know he's having trouble with his ending, you know, with finishing that last book. But I don't think that that's a function of him being a gardener necessarily. I think it has a whole lot to do with having someone else taken over writing the story with the very popular HBO series. Um, you know, creativity is a delicate thing, it's something that we have to be careful of. And I think that when people who write best as writing for discovery or gardening are told, and and I do feel like there's a lot of this telling out there. It's like, oh, you will write so much better, so much faster, so much more efficiently if you pre-plot or if you outline ahead of time that this is a skill you must learn to do. And I've had some people replying to my tweet kind of explaining to me that it's a skill that you have to learn in order to sell books to publishers. And I'm, you know, trying to kindly reply that I've sold a lot of books to publishers, and I have never outlined a book in my entire life. Um I give them very sketchy ideas about what the book will be. Mostly I write it first. I write, you know, even the books that I'm selling now that we sell on spec, I still write about a hundred pages of it. And then I most most of the synopsis that we give as part of the sales pitch is, you know, synopsizing what I've already written, and then I make some wild speculations about what might happen later. And and I think it's fine because I think that editors and agents understand that a lot of writers write this way. Uh, I often hear when I say that I don't spend time outlining ahead of time, that you know, people will come back and say, Oh, but you spend a lot of time revising on the back end. And it's not true, I don't. Um I do like I'm doing now, I sometimes go back and make passes and layer in, but I think I actually spend less time revising than I hear a lot of people talking about. I do more revising like after an editor sees it. Um but for me the story grows, and you know, that's why gardening is a good analogy for me. It's not like I have to do, you know, do a lot of pruning on it after it's grown. If I nurture it as it grows, then you know by the time it flowers, it's pretty much there. And I think that that's a perfectly valid method of writing. I totally get why it doesn't work for some people, because it absolutely does require a lot of trust. And I do a lot of thrashing, like I'm doing on this book that I'm writing now, where I'm not sure where it's going. And it definitely does feel like you know, casting yourself into that flow, throwing yourself off the cliff into the sea, and trusting that you will swim. And the thing is, is I always swim. And I think we all can swim, it just requires taking out a whole lot of those expectations. But I think really the key is is that while it is useful, excuse me, to something in my throat, I got all choked up about this. While it is absolutely useful to try to acquire new skills, I really do believe that it is fundamentally most important that as creatives, as human beings, that we discover our own way of doing things, that each one of us has an individual way of doing things, of creating, of working, of you know, like dealing with our families, raising children, you know, whatever it is that we do, we all have we bring ourselves to that. And if you're trying to do it like somebody else does it, that can really mess you up. So it's I think that refining yourself as a creative or as anything, as a human being, is a process. You know, again, coming back to what I was talking about yesterday, with success being that progressive realization of a worthy ideal or goal, that refining yourself as a human being, as a creative, is a progressive realization. You're constantly refining, whittling away the garbage that comes from other voices, other places, and finding your way of doing the thing. And I think that's what we're all striving towards. And so I guess that's why, you know, I think I would like to do this class, and I think I will, you know, offering mostly because I feel like people don't talk about writing for discovery or gardening. Um, maybe because it's hard to teach. There have been some jokes that have come back with people guessing what the syllabus would be like, which is basically, okay, start week two, okay, keep going, which is legitimate. Um, it's not easy to teach this. But I think in some ways we need permission to do this, that it is perfectly valid and okay. And I think in some ways, I mean, it's it's me because this is my process. I this feels to me like the most creatively pure way to do it. And I realize that other people are are creative when they create their outlines. Uh I just can't do it. And I think trying to force your creativity into doing a thing that isn't you will kill it. It's it's not treating your creativity as the precious thing that should be nurtured. Um, we really, you know, I don't think I can emphasize enough how important it is to protect our own creative process. And really, I think most creatives are somewhere on the spectrum. That there are probably some people who are purest gardeners. I know I'm pretty far down the gardening spectrum. There are people who are probably pure architects. Most people are gonna fall out somewhere in the middle, and that's fine. You know, what matters is that you do what's right for you. And so that turned into more of a rant than I intended today, but I guess it's on my mind. And it's really been interesting reading all the replies to it, so I appreciate that. So I'm having to, I'm soon I will have this memorized, but I will go ahead and tell you that first cup of coffee with me, Jeffy Kennedy, is part of the Frolic Podcast Network now, and you can find more outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at frolic.media slash podcasts. You can find the link in my show notes. And oh, and I'm posting the cover of the Fiery Crown on the podcast too, in case you haven't seen it yet. Book two and Forgotten Empires. Um, sequel to the Orchid Throne for all of you saying, okay, now what happens next? What happens next is there's a fiery crown. So I hope you all have a fabulous Tuesday. I hope you make some uh good steps in your progressive realization of a worthy goal or ideal. And go out and be creative in exactly the way you want to be. I'll talk to you all on Thursday. Take care. Bye bye.