as small as a world and as large as alone, Hello, I want to write, but i have no formal...

3:31pm June 8, 2014

superherochris asked: Hello, I want to write, but i have no formal writing training, or English degree of any kind. Do you feel it is necessary? Also, when you first started writing, did you just start writing or did you do a bit of character outline first? Thank you in advance.

dduane:

Hi there!

I don’t see why you would need any formal writing training. For my part, I never had any. What I know about writing, I pretty much learned from reading (for the first twenty-five or thirty years as a writer… meaning from age eight on…). I’ve never taken a writing course, and never had anything beyond the basic English-lit stuff you get in high school and the early college years. (All my formal training was in the sciences, and then nursing.)

Writers just write. And most importantly, in my experience, writers read. They read everything they can get their hands on. They read both things they’re sure they’ll enjoy and things they aren’t sure they’ll like at all. They read widely in the arts and sciences, in both fiction and nonfiction, and they try to “hear” as many other writers’ voices as possible while on their way to locating and starting to perfect their own. (Not that anyone ever perfects their voice as a writer: there’s always something new to learn, a new level of proficiency to strive for.) And this you do by writing and writing and writing and WRITING.

As for how I worked when I started: When I was eight I started at the beginning, ran through to the end of a story, and then stopped. (I think this form of workflow is routinely now referred to as “pantsing” by some, as in “flying by the seat of your pants.”) But once I started doing this work professionally, I found that I was more of a list-maker: I won’t start any substantial (read novel-length) work without a detailed outline. This is the “carpentry” model, in which building a book is for me like building a bookshelf — establish the outer shell (themes, characters and interactions, intended outcome), then put in the shelves (chapter structure and arrangement, plotting) and finally put something on the shelves (drama, action, conflict). For me this mode comes secondarily from the TV work I did early in my career, in which the building of a script from the premise stage to the outline to the final script is a very structured procedure, all the steps laid out by the formal workflow that tended to be dictated by the studios I was pitching to / working with. — Yet sometimes, where shorter work is involved, I’ll just say “Oh damn the outline” and jump straight in.

…But this is only my preference. Every writer has their own preferred method, and may change sides between the seat-of-the-pants and the make-a-list schools of thought more than once over a career. Your main job is to find out what works best for you, to keep an eye on it to make sure it keeps on working well, and if you find it’s not, to throw the old mode and workflow out without a second thought and find something else that does work now. There is no right way to do this work, and (I think) no wrong way to do it except not to do it (or not to keep working at doing it). Writers write. Period.

Hope that helps. :)