I read an article in this month’s RWA Romance Writers Report magazine about authors keeping documentation of their creative processes: manuscripts, notes, research, etc, and it got me thinking about my own box o’ dabbling. I’m a pack rat by nature, but I’ve been fighting the tendency in the last few years. Moving eight times in the last eight years will have that effect on a person.
When I was a kid, I used to make my own “books” from notebook paper, posterboard, glitter paint, and yarn. The first few pages of a story would be carefully handwritten, though never completed, and I while I kept a few of them, I certainly didn’t keep all of them. I didn’t feel I needed to since most of the stories were thinly veiled replicas of books I’d read, and even then they contained too little actual writing.
Eventually, I progressed to spirals. I still love, love, love spirals. Really. I love them. They’re a catch-all for notes, research tidbits, ideas, character sketches, and the occasional chunk of a manuscript since I handwrite in longhand as a writer’s block remedy. These I’ve kept, often returning to older ones in search of free space to write, resulting in notebooks with monthly or even yearly jumps in stories and ideas.
Whenever I flip through my spirals, I always come across some bit that I don’t remember writing or an interesting idea I’d jotted down but haven’t yet begun. After reading the article in the RWR, I selected one such spiral (also because I plan on writing some today and wanted to begin by handwriting to get the mojo going), and I found a wide range of notes: a story concept, critique notes about a friend’s manuscript, two pages of a back burner story, grammar concepts for potential language creation, a brief character sketch, and some random comment about Canada that I have no idea why I wrote it. I doubt my spirals would make sense to anyone else, especially considering they don’t always make sense even to me, but I’ve enjoyed them.
The best display of my writing evolution, however, is in a manuscript that I began in 1995 and on which I still continue to work from time-to-time. I liken this story to how I learned to crochet. No scarves or baby blankets for me. When I learned to crochet, I decided to start right in with a blanket large enough to cover a queen-sized bed. Needless to say, one edge of the blanket is tight and knotted, but in the eight years it took me to complete, you can see the slow smoothing of my work, the progress from awkward and clumsy to confident and clean. While I won’t say my writing now is even near clean and smooth, I will say that you can see a similar progression in my Story That Never Ends. The dabbling and meandering, the story that shifts like sand and the turns of phrase that clank along like an old engine, all begin to ease and evolve with the plot itself.
My spirals are a glimpse into the workings of my mind, while the STNE is the evolution of my style. I doubt anyone will be interested in either, but I always enjoy the glimpses of the way I used to be.
