The Novel Writing Process and Creativity

Question

"In your novel writing process you talk a lot about planning a novel first. But isn't writing the only 'creative' part of creative writing? Won't too much planning result in a mechanical unartistic book?"

- Giles, London, England

Answer

That's a good question, Giles. In a sense, I can't win...

• By providing a step-by-step guide to how to write a novel, some will think I've reduced novel writing to a kind of paint-by-numbers level.

• But if I told you all to just 'go with the flow' and 'trust your inner muse' and left it at that, this wouldn't be a very helpful writing website!

It is certainly true that the actual writing part of the writing process is the most creative (and by that I mean writing a first draft). It is the part where the 'magic' tends to happen - where a character takes on a life of their own, say, or where you write a page and afterwards think, 'Wow, where did that come from?!'

That kind of writing is both exhausting and exhilarating - which is why most novelists you speak to can't keep it up for more than a couple of hours a day. It involves shutting down the logical, left side of your brain and using only the creative right side. And when you really get on a roll, it is tough for your pen to keep pace with your mind.

But here is the thing: just because writing a first draft is the most purely creative part of the novel writing process, that doesn't mean that the other parts are non-creative and mechanical. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Take planning a novel. Here, you build characters using little but your own imagination, and then put them into invented situations in such a way as to shed light upon some aspect or other of the human condition. And if starting with nothing and inventing an entire world out of thin air isn't being creative, I don't know what is.

The same thing goes for revising a first draft. Here, you take all that raw material produced in the heat of creativity and work on it until the words flow. It is one of the paradoxes of fiction writing that the more effortless you want your prose to sound, the harder you have to work on it. And if taking clunky language and making it musical isn't being creative, I don't know what is.

The bottom line, Giles, is that my 9-step writing process is just a guide - something for you to adapt to your own needs and ways of working. If you want to minimize the planning and instead try to figure out what your book is about through the act of writing it, go right ahead. But don't think that planning or, later, editing are robotic tasks you could easily get a secretary to do.

The entire novel writing process, from finding an idea to dotting the final i, is one giant creative journey.

Harvey