Discussion: How do you write? (Interview George RR Martin/Stephen King)

[SaintTyr]

I was talking to my friend and he mentioned this interview. My friend studies Stephen King and reads his books.
Interview Question Here



The question is essentially how do you write?

George asks Stephen, "How the fuck do you write so much?"
To George, George writes when he has an idea! He is inspired with IDEAS and THEN he writes.
This is how most people when they start out. They have this AMAZING idea and then are inspired to write it.


According to my friend Stephen King, writing is dusting down a fossil. You have to dig away at the dirt and uncover/discover what you're writing about.
This means that you don't know what's happening in the story, but you just write, write, and write. As a discipline.
THEN the story reveals itself to you through it's writing piece by piece.


What do you guys think of this? I agree with both points to this.
Some RP's I try to write and write uncovering the plot whether I feel like it or not. (These ones I get bored of in Rp's)
Some RP's I HAVE to explore a kink and plan out a lil script to explore w/ a partner. (These excite me usually)

 

[Lydia]

I view writing as a practice, for the most part, so my habits would probably align more with King. I make a pretty clear distinction between inspiration and creativity - you don't need to feel inspired to be creative, but you do need creativity and technical skill to produce good writing.

Essentially, inspiration is just enthusiasm.

If I wait for inspiration to find me, I wouldn't be writing consistently enough to become good at it, or learn how to cultivate my own inspiration. Most times, in the process of writing, something that really sparks my inspiration/enthusiasm will appear - but not until I've dug a little, as King's metaphor would suggest. If it doesn't, I know I'm on the wrong path and the story (or scene) isn't working for me.

So, in general, it's an exploratory process. I rarely know exactly what will happen when I begin. I like it that way.

When it comes to collaborative writing, it's a bit more nuanced. Some planning is always a good idea, especially when developing the fundamentals like characters/setting/tone/etc, but for me, too many certainties and pre-scripted interactions will make the process less exciting. Why bother digging if we already know everything about everything down there?

I've found it's more interesting to have in-depth conversations about a post after it's done rather than before: getting feedback on what was good, what your reader liked, what might've been confusing or unclear, and so on. Those conversations help to improve future posts and my writing in general.

 

[Sync]

For me...I guess it depends on what I'm writing.

If I'm writing a story (whether solo, like a character backstory) or collaboratively, then I guess my writing tends to align more with Stephen King: I have an idea and I start writing it down, and the telling of the story tells me what direction the story might take.

However, if I'm world-building - as in the work I'm undertaking at the moment to build up races and cultures for my TTRPG group - then I'm more like George RR Martin: I need an idea and a concept before I can start putting things down on paper; the framework or skeleton needs to be present before I can put the flesh on it.

 

[Our Father]

I recently read George Saunders' A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which is sort of a book version of the class he teaches on Russian short stories. He intersperses the stories with commentary about the stories themselves (what makes them great, what's wrong with them), along with his thoughts on writing. He (more or less) directly follows King's lead, describing how he'll sit down and have a very simple idea (a character, a place, whatever) and just write about it. A man is sitting at a bar having a drink. And he'll just build on that. But that's just part of it, for Saunders (and I suspect King) most of writing is editing. You write that story about that man at that bar and you've got fifteen pages and then you look at them and ask yourself why should the reader give a shit about this man in this bar? At any given moment there are a lot of men sitting at a lot of bars, why this one in particular? And now you're taking the raw clay that is the man at the bar and you're starting to sculpt it into a real story that will (in some way) have an effect on your reader. That's not the story you set out to tell; you were just riffing on a guy in a bar, but you did it. It wasn't the writing that got you there, not that first draft, it was the editing.

Of course Saunders is talking about writing short stories: ten to maybe thirty pages. Stephen King mostly writes standalone novels. GRRM is trying to write a huge multi-volume epic, and I think in that's a case where you do need a bit more structure. Part of what's gotten Martin in trouble is the degree to which his narrative has sprawled. I'm old enough to remember him talking about his Meereenese knot, where he had to contrive how to get a bunch of characters into a specific configuration in order to advance the plot. This happened because Martin's pretty undisciplined about his narrative; he'll introduce new characters and subplots on sort of a whim. That's all well and good but eventually you've turned into a juggler with way too many balls in the air and now idea how to manage them.

Contrast this with someone like Brandon Sanderson, whose Stormlight Archive is a planned ten books each a thousand or more pages. Sanderson delivers those things more or less on time because he outlines and then sticks to his outline. He's got a big outline for the series (what's going to happen, what are the big beats in each book) and then when he's writing the book he outlines it chapter by chapter and only when he's got that plan laid out does he start actually writing. This serves to contain his sprawl, it helps him remain on target. I'm sure he finds himself inspired by ideas for new characters and side plots and the like but he mostly excises them because indulging in them would prevent him from finishing his larger narrative.

I would be very interested to see King answer this same question, only restricted to his Dark Tower novels which turned into a bit of a sprawling mess that he was subsequently able to wrangle (even if the wrangling was... less than satisfying).