Re: Could someone please read this?

Patricia C. Wrede wrote:

Are you saying you sit at keyboard, place fingers randomly (because you have no idea what you are going to type), wiggle them, and manage to get the result published?



Of course not. I touch-type and have for years; I don't place my fingers randomly. I'm not *talking* about randomness. I'm talking about sitting down at the keyboard with *no idea* what was coming next, and starting to type. And I've done that, and gone on for 75,000 words, and gotten the result published. Twice. Not only without planning before sitting down, but without having the foggiest notion what was going on in the plot until well over halfway through.



Uhm, planning does not have to be Before sitting. Planning is planning, even if it is just a second before you type.

I am not a liar, and I assure you that, in the two cases I cite above, those books *weren't* planned. At all.



If they were readable, they were planned, at least a fraction of a second before you wrote each word.

It's called "freewriting" when it's an exercise, and "making it up as you go" when it's a writing process for doing a whole story, and I'm not the only person who does either one.



I think all we have here is a disagreement about definitions.

"I'm going to write something now" does not strike me as "some sort of plan."



Definitions. At some point you decide what to write, and that I call a plan.

You may, of course, say that the subconscious part of my brain *had* done all sorts of planning in advance, without me ever thinking about either book (or the base ideas for either book) consciously at all;


That happens constantly. You'd hardly be able to amble down the sidewalk it if didn't.

but if that's your definition of "plan," you are stretching the term far out of any shape that's familiar to me. Ditto if you choose to claim that the mere act of putting together a sentence is a "plan." Not that you have; I'm just covering some bases.



Sorry. When I say plan, I mean any intent whatever to implement a decision, even if it's word-by-word.

And again, I'm not talking about randomness. I'm talking about making it up as I go, without planning ahead. I've done it twice.



I believe you. You just don't want to apply the word plan to this. OK.

<sigh>

Twice, for me, it didn't. Unless you count "something" as an adequate answer to "what am I going to write?"


If you write, "Bread stew on tuesday..." at some point you made a decision to write "Bread."

Now I know, sometimes your fingers seem to write words you never intended. Often I have intended "print" and typed "point," stuff like that. I'll give that you wrote some things without working up much (ok "any") of a plan, but the idea that every word came out by accident is quite hard to believe.

We have a disagreement about definitions, nothing more.

For six months in one case, and nine months in the other, I sat down at my keyboard every day knowing only what I'd written the day before. A couple of times, I thought I knew what would happen next, and every time, I was wrong. My driving motivation for finishing those books was *to find out* how they ended; it was like reading them, only excruciatingly slow. I didn't even know they were novels, rather than short stories or novelettes or novellas, until I'd gotten past the respective word-count limits.

Making a decision what to write does *not* work brilliantly for *everyone* who writes, any more than writing every day works, or writing 50,000 words a week for two weeks and then partying for three months, or writing a book backwards works for *everyone*. Each of those things works fine for some people, and not at all for others. The only think I've ever found that works for everyone is getting words on paper or into electrons *somehow*. Lots of words.


OK.

*makes note: "plan" does not count when it's word-by-word, for some people*


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