Writing Process: The Who/What/When/Where/How?

Amy Tan

Writers always want to talk about process.

Do you write every day?  At certain times of day?  In certain places? 
Do you listen to music? 
Do you wear certain clothing?  Lucky clothing? 
Do you use certain pens or paper?  Or do you draft, revise, and finalize on computer? 
Do you eat while you write?  Drink while you write?  Surf the internet so you won't have to write?

Having just returned from my third of four MFA residencies at Lesley University with all these questions still playing like a soundtrack in the back of my mind, I have started to look at whether I actually do have a writing process -- an identifiable, planful, consistent process, that is -- and whether or not I need one.   And the interesting thing is, I actually do have the hint of a partial process-in-progress, which means a full blown writing process is just around the corner.  On the one hand, I think writing is like breathing - we should be willing and able to do it anywhere, anytime, under any circumstances, in order to survive.  We should be constant, diligent observers of the world about which we write, not the world a mere ten feet from our perfectly organized, perfectly lit, perfectly quiet writing desks.  We should take notes on whatever surfaces we can find - sales receipts, gum wrappers, body parts (our own, of course) - to capture immediate sense impressions and ideas that will be nothing more than vague memories of a what once seemed like good ideas by the time our next scheduled writing session rolls around.  And instead of avoiding or drowning out the noise -- or worse, silencing it altogether -- we should listen to it.  Noise is the context of life, after all.  How better to capture -- and differentiate between --  terror's intensity and love's complexity and grief's pain than with the detail that only the sounds and the words and the noise that we so often tune out can provide?

So that is the free-spirited writer in me.  The one who loves my writing for the art it brings to my life and the art it allows my life to put into the world.

EB White

But then, there is that other part of me.  The planner.  The diligent student.  The self who takes refuge in schedules and feels slightly threatened by spontaneity (and slightly jealous of anyone who seems to wear it well).  That part of me is just as much a writer as the non-planner, but is definitely the overbearing control freak who keeps me on task and forces me to meet deadlines and is always, always, always singing in my ear: "Focus on your craft elements.  Modulate your tone.  And for the love of all that is holy, stop trying to make semi-colons work. Just use a period and get on with it."  There was a time in my life when this part of me served me well.  And it still does, to a point.  But my goal now is to more effectively merge the two halves into a whole writer who is focused but open, planful but flexible, artistic but profound, and an editor only of what is on the page and not of what is in my heart and on my mind.

So with that, I have developed what I think is a reasonable combination of the dueling Heathers, in the hopes that my writing grows more inward this semester than it does in length.  Last year was about generating words - 250 pages of words, to be exact - some of which have to come out of the book I now know I am writing so I can nurture the pieces that belong by building them up from the bottom and filling their insides with the substance and the noise of the story I am really telling.  Of course the "extras," the extractions (certainly as painful as losing a tooth, or perhaps the shot of Novacaine that happens before the loss itself) will live somewhere, and they, too, will find a process through which to form their own noisy tale someday. 

Stephen King

One thing is always consistent for me - when I am writing at home, my dog Beckett is always at my feet.  Usually on my feet. Warming my legs with his little body and licking my toes to the rhythm of my typing.  Though I am not a fan of the licking, as long as Beckett is slobbering, that means I am producing something, so I'll take it.  It's part of the journey out of that rigid need to control the world and into that peaceful place of seeing things differently, in a world where a licking dog means a growing manuscript and a honking horn in the middle of a rush hour traffic jam can sound like poetry - if I let it.

Do you have a writing "process" that you can identify/define?  Is it what you want it to be or are you thinking about changing it?  What has worked for you and what hasn't?

~~  Whatever you do ... just keep writing