What Bla Did Next: James Tenedero on: The Writing Process

I’m thrilled to have been invited to contribute some thoughts on writing to What Blá Did Next; thanks very much Bláithín!

In this vein, for today’s guest post I thought I would blog about my own experiences in crafting my first novel, The Consistency of Parchment. More specifically (and hopefully not too presumptuously) I’d like to offer a few pointers that I now realize had served me fairly well in completing my book.

1) Research your topic

I firmly believe in the value of getting well situated in the topic that you’re planning to write about. With The Consistency of Parchment I had set out to create a novel based partly in modern-day Eastern Europe, with all its attendant political and social history. In order to credibly do so, I spent a lot of time researching the character of Communist rule in this region over the decades from the mid-twentieth century onwards. I had spent some time in Budapest in 2003, which gave me a good foundation from which to explore some of these issues. However, I also did a lot of archival research, collecting any and all manner of book, pamphlet, monograph, and other published document that would help me better understand the setting that I presumed to capture in my fiction.

While I certainly don’t profess any degree of real expertise on this topic, I do feel as though this legwork gave me a much better sense for how to position the story in its broader context. If nothing else, deep research gives you a certain amount of authorial confidence, which helps to see you through the difficult portions of the storytelling task that may follow.

2) Create an outline – and feel free to ignore it subsequently

I’m a consummate list-maker; I tend to sketch out even the most mundane tasks in exacting detail before I commit to action. When it came time to begin writing my book, then, I felt compelled to prepare very precise chapter-by-chapter outlines that would guide the upcoming grunt work. This exercise was certainly helpful, but more so for the mental discipline that it forced upon me than for the actual tangible results that it yielded.

I needed that broad framework to jumpstart my writing. Once I’d started, though, I felt perfectly free to deviate from the outline that I had spent so much time generating in the first place. It can be hard to abandon (or at least significantly alter) a huge chunk of work that you’ve spent so much time getting just right. In my experience, though, on the few occasions when I’ve done so the entire process seems to flow much more naturally as a result.

3) Write blindly

This point is closely related to the previous one. Once you have your outline in place and are either filling it in or have thrown it over in a fit of reckless (but warranted) abandon, write blindly – that is, with a minimum of revision and self-censoring. For me, this is probably the hardest piece of advice to follow. As a writer, I like to think that every word I commit to the page has been carefully weighed and judged eminently appropriate for the need at hand, and so it’s hard for me to let myself be carried away by the creative process. On those rare occasions when I’ve felt as though some particularly insightful prose might be within my reach, though, this controlling tendency does me more harm than good.

In general, I’ve come to believe that there’s a lot to be said for trusting your first instinct and making sure that you get the words out onto the page in the first place. The editing can come later – which brings me to point number four:

4) Edit mercilessly

Once I had the rough first draft of my novel completed, the first thing I did (after the requisite self-congratulation and back-patting) was to drop the manuscript into a drawer and try to ignore it for a few weeks. When I came back to my copy with a more measured opinion of the book, I edited it savagely and without remorse. Sentences or even whole paragraphs were excised, description was added to some chapters and stripped out of others, and grammar was tightened up considerably. This was tough, unforgiving work, but ultimately it provided me with a much improved – and more readable – piece of fiction.

5) Avoid checklists

As a final piece of advice, I would encourage you to be wary of anyone (myself included) who professes to distill the craft of writing into a seemingly simple checklist of steps. Writing is a hard slog, and as authors we all develop our own techniques to cope with the uncertainty and anxiety that grips us all too frequently in the course of our work. You may find some ideas here that pay off exceedingly well for you. On the other hand, some of the points I’ve suggested will be much less relevant. The important thing to realize, I think, is that there’s no best way of writing your masterpiece. Try some of these tips on for size, but hold them loosely … Be ready to let them go if inspiration seems to be pulling you in an altogether different direction.

Happy writing!

James

"Big, big thanks to James for stopping by today and sharing some fabulous incites and points with us!! Be sure to check out his book The Consistency of Parchment and connect with him below!" ~ Blá