[arg_discuss] Topic of the Week Sept. 14: Perspiration or Inspiration?

[Andrea Phillips]

I just wanted to clarify Naomi's representation of my own process... ;)

On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 4:57 PM, Naomi Alderman <naomi.alderman at gmail.com>wrote:


> I actually had a conversation about this recently with Andrea and was

> *jealous as hell* when she told me that she can work on a problem and

> know that she can then just 'leave things to [her] subconscious' and

> reliably wake up the next morning with an idea. (Andrea, is this

> roughly what you said?)

>


That's... not exactly it. This works for some things and not for others. For
me there are two basic kinds of creation, the Big Picture and the detail
work. For Big Picture stuff, I can prod at the edges of it and work out the
parameters of my conceptual framework consciously. That's where I'm
establishing stuff like who my audience is meant to be, what my run time
should be, what kinds of information or mood I'm trying to convey, what
resources I have available to use. The goal here is to establish my
narrative framework and big game mechanic, if there is one.

Once I've got the basic shape of it, though, I much, much prefer giving the
whole thing a few days of determined inattention. That lets the information
just sit there, and I think my brain starts making connections while I'm not
looking. When I can do this, within a couple of days, *ding!* the whole
thing comes into sharp focus at some point, typically while I'm in the
process of falling asleep, and I am compelled to go and write it all down
because it's all so very obvious and exciting. This reliably happens for me,
provided I've spent that up-front time working out my questions, as above.
It never takes more than a week, and sometimes much less.

I've also done big picture stuff by just chipping away at it because I
didn't have time to let it sit, but I've very often had to go back and
change a lot of that work when it became obvious in later stages of
development that it was broken, so it's not my preferred method. Though
generally when I have to do Big Picture stuff that way, it means there's
time pressure and other extenuating circumstances that could affect the
quality of the work, so maybe just chipping at it, but over the few days,
would result in similar quality.

For detail work, though -- and by 'detail' I mean actual content and
specific story beats -- sometimes I'm inspired and sometimes I'm not, but I
do the work all the same, and in a month's time I won't be able to tell you
which were the things I did when I was inspired. If I'm not, it probably
took me a little (or a lot) longer to make, but there's not a meaningful
difference in quality, so far as I can tell.

-- 
Andrea Phillips
http://www.aaphillips.com
AIM: Andrh1a * Skype: Andrhia
Words * Culture * Interaction