Organic Writing

Organic writing is apparently the current “literary” term for writing by the seat of your pants, flying into the mist, or “cutting your wrists and spilling blood” onto the page.

Until recently, I’ve always considered myself a “pantser.” (Better than a mister!) To a large degree, I probably still am an organic writer, but maybe it’s because my focus isn’t what it used to be, or maybe I’ve learned a lot more about my craft than before, but I now need more structure to my creative romps or I’m likely to end up in the woods when I need to be in a palace.

When I have structure, however loose and rumpled, I can eventually recognize when I’ve galloped over the hedge and left the path behind. It’s much easier to correct my errors. Knowing my themes, the goals of my characters, and their motivations, I can see when a scene or a bit of a dialogue have gone astray. I dearly love to let my characters free to slice and dice and say what they want, but at some point, they’re going to jump that danged fence, and there I’ll be in the woods again.

I suppose I could build a fence around the woods, but I think that would take far too many pages then I want to write!

Life Lessons 101

All right, I’m back from my retreat and my niece’s wedding, and I’m now trying to dig out from under a week’s load of work. And of course, a copyedit was waiting on my doorstep. For anyone wishing to learn about the writing life, mark this as inevitable: One cannot go anywhere for a week without a copyedit, revision, or galley arriving. One of life’s little rules.

Anyway, skimming through the corrections on SMALL TOWN GIRL, I notice this copyeditor likes to snuggle adverbs really close to verbs, as in “I can’t really believe he did that.” Does that sound awful to you? It does to me. (my version—“I really can’t believe he did that) I didn’t think we were supposed to break up a verb phrase like “can believe,” or maybe that’s just infinitives we’re not supposed to split. Cheryl Norman, O Grammar Guru, are you out there? One of these days I have to figure out how to add links to this page so I can ask you directly.

I’m way too buried to bother looking this up. I’ll just STET the annoyance if it’s in dialogue or deep point-of-view and let the corrections stand for the rest. I know I don’t talk with a grammar book in my hand, and for sure my characters in this book are much more likely to trash the language than edit it, so we’ll both be right. Compromise is the road to peace, right?