“Part of the work is figuring out how to work.”
(Kevin Nguyen, from Counter Craft interview, April 8, 2025)
I’m abandoning old ways of thinking and doing. For too long I’ve clung to “identities” (think: Plotter versus Discovery Writer) and methods (“Writing into the Dark”) that are gumming up the works of my actual, functioning brain and the way I process and express my ideas.
I’m not abandoning certain aspects of these methods and identities, but I am abandoning the framework that makes me think in these terms. That framework often works as an inner monologue as I sit down to write, telling me how I should be doing things before I’ve actually started doing them.
Inner Monologue: “If I’m a discovery writer, then I shouldn’t ever make any kind of outline before I start writing. If I follow a writing into the dark methodology, then I shouldn’t ever plan ahead before I start writing.”
And also, the inner monologue has some things to say about speed and word count quotas and all the rest: “To be a real writer, I need to hit a certain word count each day/week/month/year. I need to be more disciplined. I need to apply Butt to Chair.”
On the whole, these inner voices DO reflect something important about my process. I do tend to get bored if I’m writing from an outline, so I prefer to discover as I go. I do tend to write by “cycling” instead of burping shitty words onto the page with the promise that I’ll “go back and fix them” later. I hate “revision” in the traditional way we mean it. It’s tedious, I get confused and frustrated, and in the end, I don’t think the writing is any better. So I like to “revise as I go,” i.e.: cycle through the previous sessions words and tweak or change things.
It’s not that I’m abandoning these techniques and methods.
But I need to abandon the thinking behind them. That I must adhere to a “method” at all. It’s almost like I’ve created an ideology for myself and must fit everything into that ideology. That’s what I need to abandon.
I making this a conscious thing because I’ve started to notice that my creative voice often has A LOT to say, a lot to express, but instead of just letting the words fly upon the page, I start my writing sessions by doing my “method.” I follow the cycling procedure like a ritual at church. And sometimes that cycling procedure IS what my voice wants.
But sometimes it isn’t.
Sometimes I have a line or an image that’s sticking in my brain, and I need to write that first. I need to follow that thread. It might connect to what I wrote yesterday, it might not, it might take me some time to see the connection, it might never connect (meaning it might be for a different story).
I am really good at putting words on the page. I really love putting words on the page. I can write in my notebook and fill three pages often in less than twenty minutes. I can write a paragraph or two in minutes. When I stop worrying or don’t “care” if the words are “important,” then I can write at the drop of a hat. No block whatsoever.
So if I’m good at it and love doing it, why is it so hard for me to put words on the page when it’s time to “write my fiction”?
It’s because I’m trying too hard to follow a method, to fit an identity. I’m looking at what works for others and trying on their shoes, almost in the way a child tries on her parent’s shoes and walks around comically with giant clown feet. I can walk, but it’s awkward. It works until it doesn’t, until I trip on the cat’s tail and fall.
Writing is easy for me. It’s only when I say, “Alright, time to stop fiddling around and write that FICTION,” does my hand freeze up. Because now I’m caught in the methods, in the process I’ve prescribed for myself.
But what if each new time I sit to write I acknowledge that it IS a new time, that what worked yesterday might not work today, and that trying to adhere to something that worked yesterday might be more of a fly trap than a way forward?
The only way forward is, well, forward. To do the work that is in front of me at this moment in time, not the work of yesterday or last week. What worked yesterday might not work today. Part of the work is seeing where my Creative Voice wants to go today. But that means letting go of systems or ideologies about how to do the work.
I’m not arguing against discipline. Or methods or procedures. There’s a great section in Bayles and Orland’s Art and Fear where they talk about Chopin and his Mazurkas as the way he gets his work done. Something about the Mazurka as a form allows Chopin to do his work. It’s an entry-point, a doorway that allows him to enter into his work and get things done. So having those doorways is good. I’ve got a few of them (my writer’s notebook and morning pages, for instance), and they often take me into my work. Cycling does too. Sometimes.
But sometimes the morning pages don’t take me into my work. Sometimes the cycling system fails. And what I’ve been trying to do is conform myself to the system in order to create, instead of saying, “Okay, today the system failed. Now what? Well, I want to write this line about a woman jumping down a manhole to chase a giant worm.”
Instead of pushing that woman and her giant worm to the side, maybe I should roll with it. Ride that worm. Who cares if it’s not part of my “normal” process? Who cares if it’s not part of my current work-in-progress? Maybe it will be. I don’t know. But I’ve been trying to tell my Creative Voice, “No, don’t play over there. Play over here. With these toys,” and that’s looking like a pretty destructive thing to do. Creative Voice sulks and doesn’t play at all.
So which is worse, following a random tangent but still getting words written or trying to follow the system and getting nothing written?
And yet, in saying all this to myself, am I just creating another system?
Yes.
Which means, there may be times when I will force myself to cycle and write the next line, even if the heat isn’t in me at the moment, even if I have visions of subterranean worms riding the sewer waves, even then, I will cycle through and push those words out and tell Creative Voice to be patient, it will get fun again.
Because there is no system. There are many systems and none.
There is each new day at the desk, each new embodiment of myself at that desk, each new moment where maybe I’m a bit hungrier today than I was yesterday, or I’d just read something that stuck in my craw last night, or I had a funky dream, or something came out in my morning pages and I like it and I’m gonna follow its thread, or I don’t feel like typing so I’m going to handwrite a few lines of dialogue, or I’m going to skeleton-scene something that just popped into my head even though I’m not sure I’ll use it in the story…
Each new day means figuring out how to work. Yes, there are systems and Mazurkas to help us, but sometimes they don’t help us and we have to figure out something else. Sometimes we don’t have to “figure” at all; we just have to do. The old Bradburian saying about jumping off the cliff and building one’s wings on the way down.
Each day is a new invention of the self and the work and the process. One system, many systems, no system.
Whatever gets the art out.
