Mr. Butcher's Techniques

[blgarver]

Hello everyone.

I'm often curious about the process that other writers go through.  I read Stephen King's On Writing and learned his ways (which I've adapted to my own process). 

I'm always wondering about outlinging vs. grabbing a concept and going with it.  I know King just gets an idea and starts writing.  Crichton, however, knows exactly what is going to happen before he starts, and forces his characters to stick to the plotline.

Does anyone know how Mr. Butcher works?  Or, Mr. Butcher, if you happen to read this, do you know how you work?   It's just a curiosity of mine to find out how the great ones operate.

I don't outline or pre-plot or anything.  No character outlines, nothing.  I get a few ideas in my head, often beginning with a flash of a scene or something like that, then I grow the concept of the story around it.  Like a pearl growing around a grain of sand. 

I like working this way to a point.  However, it forces me to work in bursts.  Once I catch up to myself, I have to stop and develop the story further before I can move ahead.  This becomes frustrating, because in the times when I'm trying to develop the current story, I often hit on ideas for other stories. 

And no matter what, a fresh story is always appealing. 

So, in return for my freeform, open-type method, I have finished nothing but a 5k word short story.  Several other things in progress and haunting the back of my mind, but my goal of finishing a novel is as yet unrealized.

Well, anyway, if anyone has any insight to Jim's method, I'd be interested to know.

Thanks everyone!

B. L. Garver

[Dom]

http://jimbutcher.livejournal.com/

[the neurovore of Zur-En-Aargh]

I've heard Steven Brust talk about his process, which basically seems to be making it up as it goes along, and if the plot gets stuck, the characters sit around and have meals and talk about stuff until he finds a way forward and then he goes back and cuts the intervening stuff.

Tim Powers, on the other hand, has every conversation and every event down on post-it notes and arranges and shuffles them all in great detail on a huge whiteboard and gets that all sorted before he actually writes the thing.

That two such disparate methods have produced brilliant novels is somewhat heartening to me; my own process is definitely somewhere near midway between these extremes.

The thing that would interest me about Jim's technique is how he approaches the really large-scale plot arc of the Dresden books, which I'm finding ever more impressive as the series goes on.  There aren't all that many examples of whole things of comparable length and complexity - King's Dark Tower books, Sandman and Mike Carey's Lucifer, Babylon 5... the Aubrey/Maturin books kind of grow into an arc as they go along, as do Anthony Price's brilliant David Audley/Jack Butler books, but both of those are too perfectly done for the seams to be visible to me in ways I can learn from.

[Mickey Finn]

Glen Cook tends to make it up as he goes along as well...he still doesn't know who killed someone in one of the novels (although it drove the main character, it snowballed, and all the bad guys died. ONE of them was the murderer, but even Cook doesn't know which of them did it.)

I vary. I usually have an idea where things are going, and make up the stuff in between as I go.

[blgarver]

I usually get the opening scene, a scene in the middle, and a vague version of the climax scene in my head before I write.  They'll just flash at me from someplace, and I'll get that feeling in my gut...you all know it.  That "oh man, that would be awesome in a story" feeling.

So then, those scenes are what fuels the rest of my writing.  I'm really excited about writing those scenes, so I start writing and begin to weave my way toward them, setting stuff up along the way to make it work when the story finally allows me to write the "goal scene" as I've come to call it.

But, like I said, I've not completed a novel yet.  Several partial pieces and in progress stuff, but no complete novel.  Just one short story, completed, edited, polished, to show for 12 years of writing.  I'm moving right along.

[Negolith]

I find I usually get the idea for the climax first, then I get a beginning, maybe a few key scenes and where I would like the ending to go and just start writing.  I also tend to "see" the ideas in my head like a movie and just try to describe what I'm seeing.  Gets frustating sometime.

Once in awhile I'll have a dream that runs like a complete story or has an idea that would work great.  As a matter of fact, I had one dream this spring that was too promising to ignore so I started writing.  Five months and 54,000 words later I have my first short novel.  Yahoo.  Should it ever get published it's being dedicated to whatever it was I ate that night to give me that dream.

But mostly I just wing it and see where it will take me.  And everyonce in awhile an unexpected character will pop up like it was fate.  Writing - not just a job, but an adventure!

[blgarver]

Speaking of eating things to induce strange and awesome dreams...

Try making a batch of Pillsbury (or any other brand) Triple Chocolate Chunk brownies, but add in a full bag of peanut butter M&Ms.  One of the big bags.

I was a medic that night, in a future war against the army of the dead which was lead by Jack Skelington.  That's right, the Pumpkin King was waging war against a futuristic America. 

In a word...scrumptualescent.

[SirThinks2Much]

Speaking of eating things to induce strange and awesome dreams...

Try making a batch of Pillsbury (or any other brand) Triple Chocolate Chunk brownies, but add in a full bag of peanut butter M&Ms.  One of the big bags.

I was a medic that night, in a future war against the army of the dead which was lead by Jack Skelington.  That's right, the Pumpkin King was waging war against a futuristic America. 

In a word...scrumptualescent.

Please write this. I'd buy it.

Also, I shall have to try this recipe. Thanks for sharing. 

[blgarver]

Lol.  Well, I would except the Jack Skellington part is sort of already taken.  Not that I couldn't use the army of the dead against a corrupt on the brink of collapse america, though....

But I have a couple of projects qued already, one of which I'm right at half way through.  Hoooray!  If we ever get the writing group started, I'm gonna post it chapter by chapter.