DAVID BARRIE
Tuesday, 21st June 2011. On starting over.
In the bad old days when every computer application had to be written from scratch, my first post-student job was with Price Waterhouse, who promised me a radiant future as a management consultant if I could only put up with writing programs in COBOL for a while. As it turned out, I learned a lot in the course of those arid years. One of the important lessons was about the limitations of top-down design: no matter how gifted the highly-paid guy who sketched out the overall design of the application, no matter how diligent the analysts who drew up the detailed specifications, those of us on the assembly line, knocking out the code line after line, constantly stumbled over flaws or omissions in the blueprint.
This is something to keep in mind when you hear writers talk about characters “coming to life” and “taking control” in the course of the writing process. Rather than some mystical occurrence, what they are describing is the inevitable result of the endless hours spent bashing out episodes and chapters on a keyboard. No matter how long you mull over the grandiose scheme of your novel, you’ll spend even longer writing your way through it, one sentence at a time. It’s during the seemingly unending labour of the actual writing that your brain finally becomes totally saturated with the intricacies of the tale you’re trying to tell, and that’s when the inadequacies of the masterplan become startlingly visible. Fortunately, it’s also when you’re best equipped to find new ways to move forward, since you have acquired an intimate knowledge of the terrain, having mapped it out inch by inch.
All of which makes the following scarcely surprising. Having come up with an idea for the next Franck Guerin novel in March, shuffled Post-its and scribbled notes throughout April, I started writing it for real in May. Around 25 000 words later I have now detected so many problems with the plot that I’ve decided to call a halt, step back, and rethink the whole thing from the beginning.
Writing prose may seem a higher calling than churning out computer code, but it looks like it follows exactly the same rules.
In the bad old days when every computer application had to be written from scratch, my first post-student job was with Price Waterhouse, who promised me a radiant future as a management consultant if I could only put up with writing programs in COBOL for a while. As it turned out, I learned a lot in the course of those arid years. One of the important lessons was about the limitations of top-down design: no matter how gifted the highly-paid guy who sketched out the overall design of the application, no matter how diligent the analysts who drew up the detailed specifications, those of us on the assembly line, knocking out the code line after line, constantly stumbled over flaws or omissions in the blueprint.
This is something to keep in mind when you hear writers talk about characters “coming to life” and “taking control” in the course of the writing process. Rather than some mystical occurrence, what they are describing is the inevitable result of the endless hours spent bashing out episodes and chapters on a keyboard. No matter how long you mull over the grandiose scheme of your novel, you’ll spend even longer writing your way through it, one sentence at a time. It’s during the seemingly unending labour of the actual writing that your brain finally becomes totally saturated with the intricacies of the tale you’re trying to tell, and that’s when the inadequacies of the masterplan become startlingly visible. Fortunately, it’s also when you’re best equipped to find new ways to move forward, since you have acquired an intimate knowledge of the terrain, having mapped it out inch by inch.
All of which makes the following scarcely surprising. Having come up with an idea for the next Franck Guerin novel in March, shuffled Post-its and scribbled notes throughout April, I started writing it for real in May. Around 25 000 words later I have now detected so many problems with the plot that I’ve decided to call a halt, step back, and rethink the whole thing from the beginning.
Writing prose may seem a higher calling than churning out computer code, but it looks like it follows exactly the same rules.